Sword of Shame

by The Medieval Murderers

‘The magistrate from Cambridge.’

  ‘The road is clear then?’

  ‘It is passable now. Parsons in the lodge has been despatched to request his presence. Even if you don’t get as far as Cambridge there is an inn on the road. You could put up there. Get on with your business. Leave now. Visit the Maskells.’

  ‘I’d almost forgotten about the Maskells. Forgotten I was in the wrong house.’

  ‘If you don’t go now, Nicholas, you may be stranded at Valence House for longer, much longer.’

  ‘You’d like me to go, Martha?’

  ‘This is a family matter.’

  ‘Don’t you need me as a witness?’

  ‘You said yourself you know nothing.’

  ‘That was earlier. I know now.’

  ‘Know what?’

  ‘Who it was who murdered your uncle.’

  She took a bit of persuasion but I eventually convinced Martha that she should call all the cousins into the hall so that I could explain things to them. I hinted that I had seen something from my window during the night, something which would throw light on the death of Elias and unmask the perpetrator. I was by no means as sure of my ground as I appeared. But I had a good idea or two, and I was depending on that–and my skill as a player–to see me through the next stage.

  There was a risk, I knew that. But I felt as though this household owed me something for having falsely imprisoned me in the first place. The finger of guilt had been pointed in my direction, and now I would point it at…someone else. Besides, I’ve always enjoyed that moment when the villain is revealed at the end of the story. It happens at the close of the play of Hamlet, for example. And it was, in part, this same Hamlet which had given me a notion as to how this strange crime could have been committed.

  However long it might have seemed, only a handful of hours had passed while I was shut up in Elias’s chamber and it was late morning. Motes of dust danced in the sun-beams that shot through the hall windows and, outside, the snow was turning into slush. On the dining table the sword had been laid out on a fusty blanket, perhaps as evidence for the magistrate to see. Taking care not to touch it, I established that the end of one of the cross-pieces was indeed broken off.

  There was a mixture of resentment and curiosity as the Haskell family gathered in the hall at Martha’s urging. She told them that I had something to impart about the death of Elias. Even Grant the monkey put in an appearance before being shooed away by the housekeeper Abigail. For my part I was rather sorry to see him go, regarding him as an ally. Meanwhile Cuthbert watched me with his lawyer’s gaze while Rowland seemed affronted with the world in general. Old Valentine’s glasses glinted in my direction and Elizabeth stuck her nose in the air. Nothing seemed to link them except their noses and a mutual dislike. Martha hovered on the edge of the scene and Abigail provided ale and wine. The sword remained where it was on the table, the spectre at the feast. I think that no one was willing to lay hands on it, as if it carried the taint of guilt, otherwise it might have been removed.

  ‘If you’ve something to say, Master Revill,’ said Cuthbert, mindful of the law, ‘then it would be best to save it until the magistrate arrives.’

  ‘I agree,’ said Rowland. ‘We should wait for the proper authorities.’

  ‘The trail might be cold by then,’ I said, and that silenced them for a moment even though I wasn’t exactly sure what I was talking about. Nevertheless it was plain from the way they were sitting around the table that they were waiting for me to deliver, to make good on my promise to clear up a mystery. All except one of those present (or that’s what I assumed).

  So I started.

  ‘I know that Elias Haskell was murdered, and I know how. Each of you went to see him last night and…’

  ‘Yes,’ said Dame Elizabeth, ‘and my dear cousin was alive when I left him.’

  ‘He was alive when you all left him,’ I said. ‘We know that because Abigail here was the very last in his chamber–and her master was on the verge of sleep then.’

  Somewhere in the background I was aware of the housekeeper nodding her head vigorously.

  ‘But,’ I continued, ‘there’s nothing and no one to say that one of you didn’t return to Elias’s chamber later.’

  ‘Why should any of us do that?’ said Cuthbert. ‘Be careful, Revill. There is a penalty in law for those who make false accusations.’

  ‘I haven’t accused anyone yet,’ I said, feeling increasingly uncomfortable and doing my best to conceal it. ‘But it stands to reason that one of the Haskell cousins has the best of motives for wanting to get rid of old Elias–certainly a better motive than a player who happened to have wandered into Valence House by chance.’

  ‘By chance? I thought you were here by appointment, young man,’ said Dame Elizabeth.

  ‘So I was but never mind that. I don’t know whether it was exasperation or greed or despair, or a mixture of all three, but one of the people in this room was driven to assail Elias with the sword–the very one that lies before you on the table. Elias was mortally wounded by the blow, perhaps already dead. Then this…individual…decided that it would be safer if the body was to be found outside, perhaps at some distance from the house.’

  ‘Oh yes, Master Revill,’ said Rowland, not bothering to keep the sneer out of his voice. ‘And how was that done? Did the dead man walk? There was only one set of footprints outside, remember, and those footprints were only going in one direction. One set of footprints apart from yours. We saw that clearly this morning.’

  ‘That’s because Elias was carried outside the house. When I looked out of the window last night I saw a tall figure standing in the snow, taller than anyone here. The reason was that old Elias was being lifted on another’s shoulders. He was already a tall man, but this way he was a good head higher.’

  Carried like St Christopher bore the Christ child across the river. It was that image which Grant the monkey had been trying to draw my attention to in the tapestry depicting a man carrying someone on his shoulders, and not the tapestry showing Judith with the severed head of Holofernes. This was what the monkey had seen as he stood in the hall last night. His master, dead, being shifted out of doors and into the snowy night. The door swung open, causing the ash from the dying fire to blow across the hall like a grey veil, and the monkey left his imprint. And he gibbered. I heard him from my little room upstairs.

  ‘But there was only one set of tracks, going out,’ said Valentine. ‘Nothing coming back.’

  The gentleman might have been old but he had his wits about him.

  ‘Ah, I have worked out how that was done,’ I said. ‘Hamlet.’

  I had their attention now, even though some of them were regarding me as if I’d lost my wits, rather like Prince Hamlet himself.

  ‘It was you,’ I said, nodding in the direction of Rowland Haskell, ‘who said at supper that you’d seen Master Shakespeare’s play about the mad Dane. You said there was a lot of silly talk in it, talk about hawks and handsaws and crabs going backwards.’

  ‘I remember,’ said Rowland, ‘but what has this to do with the death of our cousin?’

  ‘Because the person who carried the body out of the house took it only a few yards before depositing it on the ground. That was far enough to achieve the right effect.’

  ‘What effect?’ said Martha.

  ‘That Elias had been by himself when he died. That perhaps his death was the result of divine intervention–or demonic intervention I should say.’

  I waited for someone to object but none of those seated round the table said a word.

  ‘Then, once the body had been tumbled onto the snowy ground, that same person was careful to retrace their steps–by walking backwards like a crab and treading in the imprints already left in the snow. That way it would appear that Elias was alone when he died.’

  ‘And the sword?’ said Cuthbert. ‘How do you explain that?’

  ‘I believe it was thrown from the doorway after Elias had been left on
the ground. I remember thinking it odd that the sword was some distance from the body. Most likely it would have been too difficult for the individual who killed the old man to carry body and sword together. I suspect that he came back inside, and threw the sword from here.’

  I gestured over my shoulder towards the door.

  ‘In God’s name, why?’ said Rowland. I noticed that the sneer had gone from his tones.

  ‘Because of that story about the sword being cursed and flying through the air of its own accord, and so on. I know it sounds unlikely, the kind of thing you might read in a story or fable. But this killing was not planned, I believe. It occurred on the spur of the moment. This was the best the murderer could come up with to give a kind of superstitious gloss to the whole business.’

  ‘Superstition!’ said Cuthbert, but not so dismissively as he had on the previous evening.

  ‘Well, you can stop looking in my direction,’ said Dame Elizabeth. ‘I have the body of a weak and feeble woman, you know, and could certainly not have carried my cousin on my shoulders and then thrown a massy sword out into the night. It’s preposterous.’

  I wasn’t sure whether she was referring to the whole story I’d spun or only to the idea that she might have been the perpetrator. I admired the way in which she’d brought in our late, great Queen Elizabeth, who had described herself as a weak and feeble woman (but one having the stomach of a king) during the Spanish Armada of ’88. For all her protestations, though, I reckoned that this Elizabeth might have done it, for Elias was all skin and bone and there is no limit to what a determined woman may accomplish.

  Now it was Valentine’s turn to pipe up.

  ‘You may leave me out of the reckoning too, Master Revill. Like my dear cousin Elizabeth I am far too old for all this. I have enough trouble lugging my own bones around.’

  I was inclined to agree with him. He was quicker-witted than he looked and might be more robust too, but I doubted that that would extend to his cutting down his cousin and carrying him out of doors. So that left just the two of them, the lawyer Cuthbert and the merchant Rowland. It was interesting that no one had yet disputed this version of events, but I had been relying on my account to flush the guilty party from cover. Yet both Cuthbert and Rowland continued to look baffled. The silence lengthened.

  There was a sudden crash from beyond the table. Abigail the housekeeper had dropped the jug of ale which she had been holding all this time. The jug shattered. This was no great disaster but a trifling household accident. Yet Abigail flung her hands to her face and rushed from the room, wailing. Nobody spoke. I looked down at the floor where what was left of the drink from the jug was being speedily absorbed by the rushes that were laid there. And I recalled the fresh rushes in Elias’s room, put down to dispel the scent of death–but laid even before Elias’s body had been returned to his chamber, before I’d been imprisoned there. Very meticulous the house-keeping in this place.

  Unless, of course, the rushes were laid down by someone who perhaps wished to cover up fresh, bloody marks on the floor. And who was in a better position to put down a new covering of rushes and herbs, and to know where the stores of such things were kept, than the housekeeper of Valence?

  Abigail.

  Abigail, who had not merely renewed a floor covering but had changed her clothing as well. She was the sole member of the household to appear in a different outfit this morning. I’d taken her black smock for a mark of respect for her late master but suppose that the real reason for the change was that the old oatmeal-coloured smock was stained with blood, Elias’s blood? And, if we were looking now for someone who had the sinews to carry the old man outside and then to toss the sword into the snow after him, then Abigail certainly had the strength.

  All this flashed through my mind much more quickly than it takes to put it down here. Indeed, my mind was still racing as I took off in pursuit of the housekeeper, followed by Martha and the others. We reached the door of the kitchen. It was shut. Meg’s sister was outside, looking confused and fearful. Abigail had ordered her out of the kitchen, and when the girl seemed to hesitate had seized her by the hair and dragged her to the door and pushed her to the far side of it. She’d then bolted it.

  We listened at the door but could hear nothing. There was a window, Martha said, which gave onto the yard. We tore through the house and into the yard. The snow had turned slushy and the place where Elias’s body had lain was already no more than a vaguely darker shape on the ground. Round the wing of the house, and towards the back quarters where the kitchen was. The casement window was open, Abigail had not thought to secure herself that way.

  But then she hadn’t needed to. All she wanted was to buy herself a few moments, enough to swallow the concoction that she must have had stored away for just such a terrible pass, to use either on herself or on another. By the time I’d climbed over the sill and entered the kitchen and unbarred the door to admit the others, it was too late.

  Or almost too late. The housekeeper was dying but not quite dead. Perhaps she had misjudged the poison dose (which I think was aconite but am not absolutely sure) and so condemned herself to a few hours of life rather than a few minutes. She was carried, in great distress, to her private room which was scarcely larger than a cupboard. She lay on her trestle bed, shaking and sweating and bringing up terrible-smelling bile. The kitchen girl, Meg’s sister, attempted to give her an emetic but Abigail gestured her away. It was too late. We took it in turns to keep watch on her, for if she was a murderess she was also a dying woman, and afterwards the story was pieced together from our rags of testimony.

  Abigail’s dying words were the most potent witness to her guilt that there could have been. Her dying words and her despairing choice of suicide, and one other thing which I’ll come to in a moment. But we heard–those of us clustered about her poor, wracked body–we heard that it had been she who had killed Elias with the sword. She hadn’t intended to kill him in that way, although she had been a long time killing him another way, by feeding him soporifics mixed with traces of belladonna. He had promised her part of his estate, as he had promised the cousins, and she was trying to hasten his demise. Otherwise he might never have gone, she said, he was a tough old bugger who’d’ve outlived them all.

  But he had grown suspicious of the nightly soporifics and other remedies (which were perhaps the reason for his latest bout of illness) and, after many hints, had openly accused her when she was in his chamber the previous night following the visits of the Haskell cousins. An argument ensued, then a fight when Elias had struggled up from his bed, his bony arms flailing. As the dying Abigail told it, to defend herself, she had seized the sword from its place over the chimney-piece and struck her master a single blow on his forehead. He straightaway expired.

  In a panic, she disposed of the body and the sword in the way that I had described (though without ever imagining that it was the housekeeper who’d done it). She wanted to remove the body and sword from the house, from her domain. Perhaps she thought that his death would be seen as a queer form of suicide, perhaps she was trusting to the superstition surrounding the sword to divert the blame from her. Perhaps her thinking was a strange mixture of sense and nonsense. She returned to clean up the bloodstains from the chamber as best she could, laying fresh rushes to obscure the marks. Of course she had had to change into a different over-dress as well because her clothes were stained. She had chosen a mourning black. Widow’s weeds.

  And indeed from the strangled comments Abigail let fall it was apparent that she had once entertained hopes of marrying Elias Haskell herself but that the old man’s interest and favour had transferred to Martha on the death of the girl’s father. So the housekeeper had seen her chances of becoming mistress of Valence fade. Resentment had turned to slow-burning anger and the determination to salvage something from the wreckage. She knew her master’s habit of toying with his cousins in the matter of promises and bequests, but it did not seem to have occurred to her that he might be doing t
he same with her.

  Whether there was any treasure or anything of real value in the house I did not discover. The next morning, after the death of the housekeeper, I rode away from Valence on Rounce. I was pleased to quit this strange house for good and intended to return to Cambridge before calling on the Maskells, who dwelt north of the city. I did, however, make Martha promise that she would visit me, should she ever come to London. She thanked me for my part in solving the mystery of her uncle’s death. I asked her what she was going to do with the sword.

  ‘I shall keep it,’ she said. ‘It was not the sword but Abigail killed him.’

  ‘And you will take care of Grant?’ I said.

  ‘I am fond of the monkey. I did not care for him at first but my uncle liked him and I believe he liked my uncle.’

  ‘Yes, I think so,’ I said. ‘The monkey did him good service at the end.’ Martha looked baffled but just then Mr Fortescue arrived at her side with some questions and I took advantage of her distraction to clamber onto my hired mount and ride out of the gatehouse.

  In the latter stages of the housekeeper’s confession, Mr Fortescue the magistrate had appeared, in time to to hear her final self-incrimination before she expired. Her mode of death was terrible enough but perhaps preferable to the punishment visited on poisoners, whose crime is so heinous that they may be burnt as heretics are burnt. And it was not only her dying words, and her chosen suicide, which gave force to her testimony but also an item that was discovered in a pocket of her black mourning smock. It was the end of the sword’s cross-piece, the image of a dog’s head. It was generally assumed that she had picked it up when it had been broken off the sword during the tussle between her and Elias, and put it in her pocket. But I knew better. I’d seen this very object in the monkey’s cage the previous morning. I recalled the way in which the monkey had clamoured for admission to our session in the hallway and the way in which Abigail had shooed him impatiently off the scene. While that had been going on, I reckoned, Mr Grant had slipped the piece of the sword into her garment, a kind of pick-pocketing in reverse. It was his way of linking the housekeeper to the death of his master.