“My lord!” he cried breathlessly, his chest heaving, his face flushed. “It’s Hedyn. He’s dead, my lord!Dead!”
ASHORT WHILE LATER, Ranulf stood looking at the bloody, naked body of Hedyn and a woman, both lying dead in the sheriff’s bed.
Daveth, the servant who’d answered the door when Ranulf had visited Hedyn that day, cowered in the corner. His hair half hid his narrow face, although Ranulf could see the track of tears down his sallow cheeks.
Below, in the main room of the cottage, three other servants, all women of various ages, huddled together and wept.
As far as Ranulf could tell, nothing in the bedchamber had been disturbed, except for the occupants, either before they’d been killed, or after. Hedyn had met his end from a single thrust of a thin dagger through his heart and lay as if still asleep, on his back. The woman had not died so quickly or easily. Her nude body lay half off the bed, her left arm dangling toward the floor. He guessed she’d given her attacker at least a moment’s struggle. A trail of blood had dripped down that limp arm from the slash in her throat to puddle on the wooden boards.
Ranulf forced himself to sound—and to be—calm and dispassionate as he addressed Myghal and the servant. “Who is the woman?”
“Gwenbritha,” Myghal whispered.
God’s blood. “Sir Frioc’s leman?”
“Aye, sir.”
“How long has she been Hedyn’s lover?”
“I never knew she was till now.” Myghal glanced at the servant, who shook his head. “Nobody did.”
Ranulf certainly had not. He wondered if she was the woman Hedyn had spoken of that day, the one he had lost? If so, the sheriff might have wished Sir Frioc dead, as he had once wished Lord Fontenbleu to hell.
Yet he couldn’t imagine Hedyn a murderer, although he knew that anger and rejection could make a man do things he wouldn’t consider otherwise.
But who then had killed Hedyn and the woman, and why? “Even you were not aware your master had a lover?” he asked Daveth.
“I knew there wassomeone,” the servant answered promptly, his voice quavering, yet determined, too. “But my master didn’t tell me who, or anything except he’d be gone for the night when he went to see her. This was the first time she’d been to this house.”
Ranulf saw nothing in Daveth’s demeanor to suggest he was lying, although that didn’t mean he wasn’t. “I see. And what happened last night?”
“The master told me he wouldn’t need me again, so I was in the kitchen, my lord, with the other servants, until it was time for me to go to bed.”
They’d probably been talking about their master and Gwenbritha, no doubt at some length, if they’d been as surprised as he was by the identity of Hedyn’s lover.
“The kitchen’s attached by a corridor, my lord, separate from the house,” Myghal clarified.
“That’s right,” Daveth agreed. “We was all in there, sir, having a bit of ale and a chat, until I went to bed.”
Ranulf had already taken note of the general layout of the house, and the means by which someone could enter. “You don’t sleep in the kitchen, do you?”
Daveth shook his head. “No, sir. I make my bed by the hearth in the main room below.”
“And you heard nothing last night? No sound of an intruder or a struggle?”
The servant bit his lip and shifted his weight from one leg to the other. “I did hear some noises in the night, my lord, coming from this room. Woke me up, in fact, but I thought…well, I thought it was just my master and his woman.”
If the servant had been somehow involved, directly or indirectly, it was unlikely he’d volunteer such information.
It could be that the attacker had entered and crept upstairs while the servants were in the kitchen. A fast and cunning thief or assassin could slip into a house and up the stairs in what seemed no more than a blink of the eye. “When did you realize something was amiss?”
Daveth glanced at the bodies, then quickly away. “Not till the noon, my lord. It wasn’t like my master to spend the morning in bed unless he was ill—but it wasn’t like him to bring a woman back here, neither. So I thought I’d best not disturb him, and waited for him to call me. Leastways, I waited till the noon, and then I wondered if they might be hungry, so I brung some bread and honey and wine. I never expected…”
He fell silent, having no need to explain what he hadn’t expected to find.
Ranulf had seen the spilled wine and a broken carafe on the steps. A tray lay at the bottom of the stairs, a loaf of bread closeto it, as if the fellow had been so shocked by his discovery, he’d dropped the tray.
“Go to the kitchen and wait,” he ordered Daveth, “and have the other servants wait with you. I’ll speak to them later. Close the door behind you.”
