The First Murder

by The Medieval Murderers

  He lay where he fell, shaken by the tumble and unable to gather his mind to comprehend where he was. Finally he pushed himself to his knees and felt for what he had tripped over. He knew at once it was a man.

  Most of the body lay in darkness, only the feet were caught in the edge of the pool of light spilling from the tower. Oswin shook the man’s leg, but he did not stir. The young monk shuffled forward, still on his knees, and felt the man’s chest. The flesh was still warm, but the ribs were not rising and falling, and as he drew his hand away he felt the warm, sticky fluid on his fingers.

  Oswin crossed himself and his lips began to mumble the prayers for the newly dead. But the words ceased abruptly as a thought exploded into his head. His prayers had been answered! The Blessed Virgin had heard him. This was his escape from his tormenter. It was as if the Virgin Mary herself had cast this corpse at his feet. Whispering fervent prayers of gratitude and with hands trembling now, not from fear, but excitement, Brother Oswin fumbled for his knife.

  It was after the noon bell when Henry and the Ely men once again assembled behind the wagon, ready to begin the first of the plays. It had rained heavily before dawn and the sky was still grey and swollen with cloud. The corners of the heavy sailcloth lashed over the wagon flapped in the strengthening wind and the ropes creaked with the strain of holding it down. The players prodded the canvas with poles, trying to shake off the puddles of water that had accumulated on the top. The men’s mood was as gloomy as the day. Their pride had been wounded as well as their purses, but they were determined no trickster would make fools of them for a second time.

  ‘You bring the money straight to me, young Ben,’ Cuddy said. ‘Don’t you let Martin or that cousin of his lay a finger on that bag till we’ve counted the coins.’

  He didn’t trouble to lower his great booming voice, and Henry was certain he was meant to hear. John came ambling over, the jawbone already tucked into his leather belt. Henry felt his bruises throb at the mere sight of it.

  ‘Where is this thieving cousin of yours?’ John demanded. ‘Crowd’s calling for us to start, but he speaks first as the angel so we can’t begin until he takes his place. Too ashamed to show his face to us, is he?’ Then a thought struck him and he grabbed the front of Henry’s robe in his great fist. ‘Has he run off with our money?’

  ‘Course not!’ Henry protested.

  ‘Well, where is he, then?’ Cuddy demanded.

  ‘I haven’t seen him since he left the barn last night,’ Henry said. ‘Look he . . . he must be around here somewhere. The costume box is unlocked, so most likely he’s taken his robes to dress for his part and has gone for a mug of ale. He’ll want to soothe his throat before the play begins.’

  ‘He’ll need more than ale to soothe his throat when I get hold of him,’ John said sourly. ‘But never mind that, the crowd is going to start chucking things if we don’t give them something soon. I’ve already seen some lads creeping to the front with rotten fruit in their hands. We’ll just have to start with your first speech. And hope our angel turns up in time to say his “Cursed Cain” part at the end.’

  Henry’s stomach lurched. If John had played up to the crowd with that jawbone before, it was nothing to how he might wield it if he thought that Henry had been party to cheating the Ely men of the money.

  ‘Look,’ he said desperately, ‘why don’t we forget all about “Cain and Abel” and just give them “The Sacrifice of Isaac” and The Shepherds’ Play? That’ll give me a chance to go and look for Martin.’

  ‘Wouldn’t work,’ John said. ‘The angel’s the first to speak in the “Isaac” too, and if he doesn’t say the line. “Now show he may, if he loveth God more than his child”, the rest of the story makes no sense.’

  ‘Besides,’ Cuddy said, ‘we’re not such fools as to let you go running off with your cousin and our money. You’re staying here, until your cousin brings us what he stole. And you’d better hope he turns up soon or you’ll soon realise a blow from that jawbone is nothing more than a smack with a feather compared to what we’ll do to you.’

  Henry, his stomach churning, took up his place on the darkened wagon. He heard the players strike up a tune on drums and frestelles to draw the attention of the crowd. Then Cuddy gave the orders to start the smoke belching from hell, while the others loosened the last of the ties holding down the sailcloth. Light flooded in as the cloth was pulled aside. Henry swallowed hard and cleared his throat. Painfully he kneeled with his back to hell, facing the throne of God. It seemed to make more sense to address his lines to that rather than empty air where the angel should have been standing.

  ‘“I thank you, Lord, for Your goodness,

  That has made me, on Earth, Your man.

  I worship . . . ”’

  He became aware of a loud murmuring in the audience. He glanced sideways, trying to see what was amiss without turning his head. Were they disappointed because there was no angel?

  Henry raised his voice over the buzzing of the crowd. ‘“I worship you with—”’

  A woman started to scream. Others joined in. Some were backing away, desperately trying to extricate themselves from the throng, but they were trapped by the rest of the crowd, who were trying to wriggle nearer to the wagon.

  Still on his knees, and unable to move swiftly because of the stiffness of his back, Henry turned his head in bewilderment, as John stumbled past him and halted abruptly in front of the great gaping mouth of hell.

  ‘Stop that smoke,’ he roared, flapping his arms vigorously to disperse it.

  He peered into the open jaws, then staggered backwards as if he’d been punched.

  ‘Holy Virgin, defend us!’ John crossed himself several times in rapid succession and stood rocking on his heels.

  Henry clambered stiffly to his feet and tried to peer round John’s broad frame, but John caught hold of Henry’s arm and pulled him away.

  ‘Don’t look, lad. Trust me, you don’t want to see.’

  But his warning came too late, Henry had already seen.

  A faint trickle of smoke still swirled in hell’s mouth, but it was not enough to obscure the figure that was lying inside. The man, dressed in white angel robes and feathered wings, was lying on his belly. His arms were stretched out on either side in a cruciform, like a monk doing penance before an altar. But where his head should have been there was nothing but the bloody stump of a neck. The pool of blood had seeped into the pure white robes, and stained the tips of the swan’s feathers scarlet. And the man’s head wasn’t the only part of him that was missing. His right arm now ended at his wrist from which the splintered bone glistened white against the red.

  For a moment Henry stood and stared as if the corpse was just another of the carpenter’s painted props. Then with a shriek of horror, he knocked John aside and fled.

  If it hadn’t been for the river at the bottom of the hill, Henry might never have stopped running. He ran as if that mutilated angel was swooping after him like a falcon and he was the quarry. He charged blindly towards the water and would have tumbled in had not a river-man caught him and dragged him back.

  ‘Steady, lad! You don’t want to go falling in there. River’s thick with boats, you’ll get your head staved in by a bow or an oar. Here, are you sick?’ he added, as Henry sank to his knees. ‘It’s not the pestilence, is it?’ he said, backing away in alarm as Henry vomited copiously.

  By now Henry had attracted a small crowd of curious onlookers, staring at him intently to see if his face and arms bore any sign of the telltale blue-black marks, though they were all careful to keep their distance. Henry staggered to his feet and stumbled along the bank, though his legs were trembling so much he could barely manage to walk never mind run.

  ‘There he is!’ someone yelled. ‘Seize that man! Don’t just stand there, grab him! Don’t let him get away.’

  Without thinking Henry glanced back to see who they were shouting about. Several lay brothers were racing down towards the river, their sandal
led feet slapping loudly on the stones. Henry’s mind was so dazed that it took several moments to register that they were pointing at him. By the time he realised, it was too late. Two of the rivermen had grabbed his arms and he found himself being dragged back along the bank.

  ‘This the man you’re after?’ one of the river-men said, thrusting Henry towards the first of the lay brothers, who was panting so hard he could only reply with a nod.

  ‘What’s he done?’ the other river-man asked curiously.

  ‘K . . . killed a man, that’s what . . . Not just murdered him, but mutilated the body too. And if that weren’t bad enough, he did it on priory land, right in front of the cathedral door, with the holy statues of Christ and the saints looking down on the bloody deed.’

  The river-men and bystanders growled their outrage. The lay brother nodded with satisfaction, gratified by the reaction he was getting.

  ‘And you haven’t heard the worst of it. It wasn’t a stranger he murdered. It was his own kin, his poor cousin, wickedly done to death.’

  The river-man gripped Henry’s arm as if he was trying to snap the bone in two. ‘God’s blood, you’ll hang for sure, boy, that’s if you survive the flogging they’ll give you first. And, trust me, there won’t be a man or woman in Ely who’ll beg mercy for you.’

  It wasn’t for nothing that the priory’s gaol was known as ‘hell’. It lay beneath the infirmary, its walls stout and windowless, and it was as well they were, for once news of the heinous crime spread through the town, not even the lay brothers could prevent the mob gathering to hurl insults and missiles at the priory gate. The women were the worst, for hadn’t Martin been the very image of Gabriel himself with his golden curls and blue eyes, and by the end of that day they had convinced themselves Henry wasn’t just guilty of slaying a man, but of murdering a holy angel.

  Henry, dragged past the gate on his way to the gaol, heard the shrieks of abuse and cringed as the stones thudded against the thick oak door. He was almost relieved when they threw him down inside the safety of the dark, stinking pit. The great stone walls were green with slime and as dank as a village well. But Henry was not left to suffer the misery of hell alone. Cuddy and John were already sitting with their backs against the wall, their necks encircled with heavy hoops of iron chaining them to the rough stones. Henry did not resist when he was chained to the opposite wall, though the metal cut painfully into his neck and the chains were too short to allow him to either lie down or stand. He knew if Cuddy and John had not been similarly chained, he’d be dead long before the hangman could do his work.

  Henry had sworn before Prior Alan de Walsingham that he was innocent. It was John and Cuddy who had quarrelled with Martin. It was their money he had stolen. It was they who had killed him in revenge, or else it was a member of the Glovers’ Guild. Hadn’t the Ely men said the Glovers always performed ‘Cain and Abel’? Maybe they’d done it to prove they were right about the curse and to frighten off anyone else who had the audacity to dare to perform their play.

  Cuddy and John, in turn, insisted that the culprit was Henry for, unlike him, they had been in the company of the other players drowning their sorrows half the night and had then walked home in each other’s company to their families, never leaving their hearths again until it was time to perform the play. Besides, they were God-fearing, honest Ely men, which all the neighbours would swear to, while for all anyone knew, Henry might have murdered a dozen men before he arrived in Ely.

  Prior Alan had long held the belief that any man in Ely would murder his own grandmother and sell her hide for leather if he thought he could get away with it. And the more he listened to the tale of the stolen money, the more certain he became that since all of the actors had been cheated of their money they had all colluded in the murder, for had they not already admitted they had spent the night drinking together?

  But when the prior sent men to the houses of the other players, they discovered the rest of the actors had taken full advantage of the delay and had already slipped out of Ely, assisted no doubt by the local boatmen, who were firmly convinced, as were all the locals, that Henry was the killer, and certainly not one of their own.

  On hearing the news Prior Alan uttered an oath that would have made a whore blush, for if the fugitives were hiding out in the marshes or were in a boat halfway down the river concealed under empty sacks, it would take weeks to round them all up and a good number of men too, men he could ill afford to spare with the crowds of pilgrims pouring daily into Ely. But at least he’d had three of the murdering wretches safely under lock and key, and if the crowd no longer had The Play of Adam to divert them, they would soon have a hanging to entertain them instead.

  ‘Father Prior, the stench is definitely getting stronger,’ Will de Copham said anxiously. ‘We can’t continue to ignore it. Even old Brother Godwin remarked on it and you know he sat on some dog dung the other week and didn’t even notice the stink of that.’

  Strictly speaking, of course, it was the sacrist’s job to maintain the fabric of the cathedral, but as custodian of the cathedral, Will was not only responsible for security but also for maintaining good order. He already had enough problems on that score without the lay brothers refusing to keep watch near the shrine because the stench was making them sick.

  ‘But the smell cannot be emanating from the tomb of St Withburga,’ Prior Alan protested. ‘She’s a holy saint and saints’ bodies emit the sweet perfume of the rose of heaven, not the stench of corruption. Are you sure it’s not simply the odour of the pilgrims themselves? I saw one with such a stinking sore on his leg even his fellow pilgrims were gagging. Perhaps the smell lingered.’

  Will shook his head. ‘Most pilgrims stay longest at St Etheldreda’s shrine, for she’s the one they most favour. If it was the pilgrims themselves, the smell should be worse there. Even the perfume of incense is no longer masking the stench. If we don’t do something soon, rumours may begin to spread that St Withburga is no longer at ease in her tomb and wishes to return to Dereham.’

  The prior winced. St Withburga’s body had been taken from her grave in Dereham almost four centuries ago and brought to join her sisters in their tombs at Ely, but even after all these years the Dereham folk still regarded this act of piety as theft and regularly sent demands for her return, not least because of the valuable income this would bring from the pilgrims.

  Having been sacrist himself for many years, Prior Alan was nothing if not a pragmatic man, and distasteful though it might be to disturb the resting place of a saint, he knew the pilgrims would soon cease to come if the shrine to which they came for cures made them want to vomit.

  He sighed, pressing the tips of his fingers together, then finally nodded. ‘I dare say it’s nothing more than a family of mice that have crawled inside and died, or even a rotting eel that some wicked little brat has managed to push through a hole just to annoy his elders. But you and I will investigate tonight after the cathedral is closed. None of the monks or lay brothers must be present. The slightest hint of anything amiss and gossip will be all round the town before dawn, most of it wilder than a rabid wolf. The townspeople are already so anxious about the pestilence they will take anything as a sign of ill omen. There’s been quite enough upset with the murder of that player Martin; I want nothing more to agitate the people or the priory.’

  The cathedral was in darkness save for the candles on the altars and those flickering around the tombs of the saints. Will had placed a few lanterns on the floor to illuminate the shrine, but in a position where they would not shine out through the windows. It was vital that the townspeople did not notice any unusual activity in the building. The gold, silver and jewelled offerings that normally adorned the tomb had been carefully collected and now lay in a heap on a piece of cloth, glittering in the flickering candlelight like a pirates’ hoard.

  Working in silence, the prior and custodian together pulled away the back panel of the shrine, which allowed access to the inside, so that coins pushe
d through the holes could be removed. Prior Alan pressed a cloth to his nose. There was no mistaking it now that they were so close, the stench was coming from somewhere inside. He kneeled down, moving the lantern so that the light fell in turn into each corner of the tomb as he searched for rodent corpses or anything else that might account for the smell, but he saw only candle wax, the glint of a few coins and eons of dust scuffed by the sandal prints of the monks who had over the years squeezed in to retrieve the offerings.

  He was just struggling to his feet again when Will tugged on his sleeve. ‘Look, Father Prior,’ he breathed, ‘the coffin’s been disturbed.’

  Alan raised his lantern so that the light fell on the top of the stone coffin. The lid was still in place, but it had been twisted slightly at an angle so that the top corner lay open just a couple of inches. As soon as he bent over the gap Prior Alan was left in little doubt that the stench was coming from inside.

  He crossed himself, and muttered a prayer for forgiveness to St Withburga for the offence he was about to offer. Then placing both hands against the stone lid, he pushed it. The rasp of stone on stone seemed to echo off the dark walls and for a moment he hesitated, unnerved by the ominous sound.

  Then he gestured impatiently to Will, who had taken a few paces back.

  ‘Bring your candle, I need more light. Stop looking so fearful. It’s a saint not a revenant buried in this coffin.’

  Reluctantly Will stood behind him and raised his lantern so that the light from the candle glowed yellow inside the hollow stone. The saint’s bones were wrapped in a cloth that had turned brown with age. Carefully, Prior Alan eased the rotting fabric aside. The bones and skull were still covered in strips of parchment-like skin and strands of grey hair. But there was something else in the coffin, something lying where St Withburga’s desiccated hand should have been. It was a human hand, a right hand, but it was not the hand of a saint. This hand had been severed at the wrist, and the rotting flesh was covered in a stinking mass of writhing maggots.