The Vanishing Thief (Dumnonia Mysteries 3) by Clare Jayne

Author:Clare Jayne [Jayne, Clare]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Meroda Publishing
Published: 2022-04-25T16:00:00+00:00

19. Morvoren is Sceptical

“I THINK I know now how the theft occurred,” Uxio told Morvoren the next day, when she had had a night to rest her cold, aching limbs and recover from the chase for the wrong person. Uxio’s chapel felt almost warm compared to the bitter cold of being constantly outside the previous day, so Morvoren felt no more than a twinge of irritation that he might have discovered something without her.

He told her about testing the weight of the ingots and she nodded, since they had considered that Hertha might have been working with someone else. His next words weren’t what she was expecting, though. “I believe Hertha was trying to stop the theft that night, or at least find out who the guilty person was. This is how I think it happened. There was a wedding that day and everyone was celebrating in the evening. Later that night Hertha happened to be awake late and saw a man carrying a heavy sack up from the lower part of the castle...”

“We know it wasn’t a man,” Morvoren interrupted, not believing any of this.

“Just listen. She saw someone and guessed that he had stolen something, so she followed him. Firstly he managed to drop the sack off the wall in the courtyard onto the beach below – that was the loud noise that made the guards at the gate run inside, leaving only Jowen there. Now that he was free to leave the castle, he did so and then retrieved the sack of ingots. Hertha followed him and, when he later saw her, he killed her.”

“Some of that makes sense,” she offered, “but why is Hertha suddenly acting like a hero in your tale?”

“I don’t want to betray a confidence, but I’ll tell you what I can. Hertha served Rhia since before the queen married her first husband and, in all that time, she was completely loyal to her, even telling the queen when someone tried to bribe her to convince the queen of something to that person’s benefit. Why would she turn against her now?”

“Because she wasn’t happy and, perhaps, didn’t see it as disloyalty. After all, the ingots didn’t directly belong to Rhia.”

“But doesn’t it make just as much sense that she saw the culprit and wanted to catch him?”

“And why has this person, who Jowen saw was a woman, now turned into a man?”

“Were not you the one who believed that to be Hertha’s ghost? Donnchad said she would have struggled to carry the sack any distance and she must be the strongest woman in the castle. Perhaps a woman and a man were working together, the man to carry the sack and distract the guards by dropping it over the wall, and the woman later taking it when... I know not... Maybe he had to return to the castle to avoid suspicion, if he was a warrior, for instance, who could have taken the key. Peswera and Locryn?”

Morvoren laughed. “You almost succeeded in convincing me until you mentioned Peswera, who forgets what she is saying halfway through a sentence.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.