The Deadliest Sin

by The Medieval Murderers

  The body was removed and the coroner departed with his servant. The physician was buried in the churchyard. Master John gave no sign of gloating at the death of a rival but took extra care with his funeral devotions, sprinkling holy water on the grave to drive off the devils that might trouble the burial-place of a man who had died so suddenly and without being shriven. Both the Carters and the Raths paid for daily masses to be said for Thomas Flytte. You could see why my family should do this, but the piety of William Carter caused some comment, considering how tight-fisted he was. People thought he was trying to compensate somehow for the body being discovered on his land. All this while there was no sign of Reeve, the attendant and supposed son of Thomas.

  If the keeper of the King’s peace had been in the area, he would have looked into the death. But he was not, and so the crime went without investigation.

  You couldn’t stop people talking about it, though.

  And the talk in the village was of who might have so hated or feared Thomas Flytte that he had assailed him and left him dead in that remote spot. Some people mentioned Hugh Tanner, the pedlar. We’d seen the argument between him and the physician while we were . . . resting . . . near the wash-house, Laurence and I, and it appeared that Hugh had lost no opportunity of venting his anger at Master Thomas to all those who stopped to examine his wares, calling him a fraud and so on. Was he responsible for the fatal attack on Thomas Flytte?

  Then there was Mistress Travis, the cunning-woman. She had lost some of her custom because of the physician’s words. Furthermore, she was feared because she was a strange, strong woman – certainly strong enough to attack a man, and with enough power in her upper arms to wrap a cord round his neck. Some favoured the cunning-woman. Others whispered that the priest had spoken out in his sermons against physicians and men of science – and they knew that Master John was resentful because offerings that should have come the church’s way were being diverted to Master Thomas. But then they recalled the priest’s care with the funeral and they reproached themselves for speaking ill of a man of God. And then finally there was Reeve. As I said, almost no one knew that he was Thomas’s son but the fact that he was nowhere to be found after the murder was enough to cast suspicion on him.

  One thing was apparent, though, or it would have been to anyone who thought carefully about the matter. The physician had not been murdered by a thief, for he had been left in possession of the topaz brooch, which the coroner had confiscated. It was possible that the murderer might have been intending to search for something to take but had been disturbed by the arrival of Laurence and me, coming from opposite directions. But if that was so then surely we would have glimpsed him . . . or her? We said nothing of how we’d discovered the body together, and I certainly said nothing of what I had discovered under the stand of trees near to the stile.

  Not until later, when I told Laurence, and once I had we couldn’t stop talking. We talked about the murder and, after we’d finished, we talked about it again. It was less difficult for us to meet now. Our families were not so watchful and the days were longer, even if the sun rarely shone. Well, the summer wore on and the death of the physician continued to cast a cloud across Wenham, even though at least one other villager died during those months. His name was Robert Short, I remember. But he was an old man and he died naturally, while Thomas Flytte did not.

  Still there was no sign of the King’s peace and it seemed that justice would never be done. The gossip and speculation about who the murderer might be began to die down. One person who was cleared of the crime was Hugh the pedlar. He returned to Wenham at the beginning of the autumn and reacted with surprise when he heard of the physician’s violent death.

  It seemed he’d not stayed long in the village that market day but departed southwards. He admitted he’d known Thomas Flytte in another place, as he put it, and that he thought the doctor of physic was – not what he appeared to be. When pressed, he admitted that he’d encountered Thomas Flytte in London. (And I thought of the story I’d heard from my mother, about the physician and the courtier who kept company with projectors and forecasters and vagabonds. Was it possible that Hugh Tanner was one of them?) But Hugh held no grudge against the physician. If he’d called him a fraud it was only because he’d been called one himself in the first place. Let every man thrive as best he can under the eye of God, was his motto. If Flytte was dead, and by violence too, then he was sorry to hear it. There was such meekness about him and his hang-dog air that scarcely anyone believed he could have choked the life out of the doctor.

  If there was a shadow over the village there was a darker one over my own house. My mother grew quiet and no longer wanted to speak good of everybody. She seemed to be keeping separate from my father, and I thought she had been wounded by the death of her doctor cousin. She refused to do anything about the little cottage where the physician had lived with his son Reeve, but let it lie empty and my father did not seem inclined to contradict her. Perhaps she thought Reeve was going to return to Wenham even though he would have been seized by the villagers if he’d done so. But I don’t think my mother ever believed Reeve was guilty. Towards the autumn, she fell ill and grew weak. She spent long periods of every day in bed, so I had to take over many of the duties in the house. I am sure she wondered whether, had Thomas Flytte still been alive, he would have found a remedy for her affliction.

  Perhaps it was to clear away those shadows that I wanted to find out what had happened. Or perhaps I felt I had an obligation to the physician who had saved me from death.

  I had only two things to help me, and one of them was no more than a memory. There was the little talisman I’d picked up from the ground, the golden image of a lion in a wooden frame. And, though it no longer existed, clear in my mind’s eye I had the image of the shoe-marks in the wet earth of the spinney. From their size, I knew they were not the print of the physician’s shoes but belonged to whoever had been waiting in ambush for him, for surely no one would stand fixed in one spot under the trees unless they had a purpose. I struggled to see the scene through the eyes of that unknown man – for I was sure it was a man, from the size of the shoes and the violence of the attack – but I could see and understand nothing. Then I thought of the cunning-woman who lived in the woods, Mistress Travis. She had the gift, like Hugh Tanner. But, unlike him, she was prepared to use it. Many villagers went to her to find out things that they could not see for themselves, things happening just beyond the corner of their eyes and even things that would happen in the future. They paid these visits in an uneasy way, sometimes, and in defiance of Master John, but they paid them all the same.

  At once, I was seized with the desire to go to the cunning-woman and show her the only thing which I had: the talisman. But I did not want to do this by myself. Laurence and I talked about it, of course. I think there were shadows over Laurence’s house too during that summer. His father was even more silent than usual while his mother would not stop talking, and they grated on each other like a knife against stone.

  In the end, Laurence agreed to go with me. Perhaps he was as I was, half eager, half afraid to discover the truth.

  Mistress Travis, the cunning-woman, was not so fearful to me as she was to some others in Wenham. As a child, I once got lost in the Great Wood and I ran into her, in my tears and panic not realising she was there. Though the first sight of her was terrifying, she spoke soothing words and took me by the hand and led me through a maze of over-grown paths until we reached the edge of the trees and when I saw the chimney-smoke from my home in the distance, I slipped out of her grasp and ran towards it without a backward glance. So I had no reason to be daunted by her. Even so, Laurence and I approached the hut in the woods in great trepidation. If we hadn’t been driven by our desire to find out the truth we would have turned and run back home.

  It was a late afternoon in autumn and the trees were almost bare. The branches creaked. The way to the cunning-woman’s was not so hard to find, for other village folk apa
rt from us were accustomed to beating a path to her door. As I walked, I clutched the talisman with the image of the gold lion. The hut was in a clearing where nothing seemed to grow, as though the ground immediately around it was blighted. The door of the hut was open, or perhaps it could never be properly closed since it hung drunkenly on a single hinge of rope. We came to a halt either side of the entrance. Mistress Travis was squatting on a low stool just inside. Her white hair curtained her face and the bedraggled smock she wore concealed the shape beneath like a tent.

  ‘You are too big to be lost in the woods now,’ she said in her singsong voice.

  This was directed at me. I was surprised she remembered the frightened child.

  ‘I have my friend Laurence for company,’ I said.

  The cunning-woman ducked her head slightly. She knew Laurence, of course, even if they’d never spoken. She knew everyone in the village and everyone knew her.

  I waited for Laurence to say something but he would not even look the cunning-woman in the face, instead keeping his eyes fastened on the earth, so I stretched out my hand instead and said: ‘We have brought you something, Mistress Travis, an offering.’

  The old woman put out a palm that was oddly smooth and soft. I placed the talisman in it. She tilted it so that it caught the little light remaining in the clearing. Her eyes were pure blue. She raised the talisman to her nose and sniffed at it. Looking at her, I thought that despite the hairs on her face, she must have been handsome many years ago. I remembered one of the stories I’d heard about her: that she’d been in holy orders and was once a woman of learning and refinement. ‘This is not yours,’ she said.

  ‘I found it.’

  ‘Where?’

  ‘In a copse of trees near a stile.’

  ‘Where the physician was done to death?’

  ‘Yes,’ said Laurence, speaking up for the first time. ‘You were there that afternoon, Mistress Travis. I saw you.’

  The cunning-woman looked at Laurence. I could not tell whether her look was an admission – yes, I was there – or whether she didn’t know what he was talking about. I wondered why he’d raised the subject. Why should she remember where she’d been six months ago? Now she bent her white-haired head over the object that nestled in her palm.

  ‘For sure, it is one of the physician’s things,’ said Mistress Travis, examining the golden image tucked inside the little frame. ‘They say the image of the lion is a protection against the stone. It is also for those of a choleric disposition or humour and all other hot conditions.’

  ‘Then the physician must have dropped it,’ said Laurence.

  ‘No,’ said the crouching woman. She brushed her finger-tips several times back and forth across the little image and she cocked her head, as though she was listening to someone we could neither see nor hear. ‘Its story is plain enough if you have the ears to hear it. This passed from the physician’s hands into another’s. There was no loss involved.’

  I thought she meant that the talisman must have been sold or given away, not stolen.

  ‘Whose hands?’ said Laurence.

  I felt my heart beat faster. Mistress Travis did not reply. She clasped the talisman in both her own hands now and rubbed it gently. She raised her hands to her face and then cradled her cheek against them and closed her blue eyes. She looked like a child trying to fall asleep. Laurence and I gazed at each other. It was growing more gloomy in the clearing and the evening breeze rattled above us. We were startled by a sudden moan from Mistress Travis. Then, with her hands still to the side of her face and without changing her crouching posture on the stool, she started to speak.

  ‘The rain is coming down hard. He is walking along the path across the fields. He is moving fast because he is eager to see her. Anger and hatred boil up within me and cloud my vision. The rain is coming down hard even under the trees where I am standing and I wipe my hands across my eyes to clear them but I still cannot see clearly. And now he is drawing level with me and all I see is his arms swinging and his legs moving like knives. Soon he will be with her in the dry and the warm and his legs will be moving like knives, and hers too moving against his, and the anger and hatred boil over and spill down my sides. Here, at my side, somewhere at my side, I have a piece of rope that I have been keeping for just such an occasion. No, it is for this occasion now, as he walks past me so fast and then stops close to the stile. He is thinking for a moment how best to get over it without marring his clothes, and now is the same moment when I go and—’

  The cunning-woman delivered all this in her usual singsong tone. When she stopped it was in mid-flow, as if she had been cut off by some external force. That was odd because neither Laurence nor I had spoken a word or moved an inch. But even odder was the fact that though Mistress Travis talked of anger and hatred her voice had not changed in its up-and-down style. It was as if she were reading words she did not understand out of a book. Gooseflesh rose on my arms and I felt my hair stir. Beside me, I sensed rather than saw that Laurence was just as horrified as I.

  We waited, not certain what to do next. The woman lowered her hands to her lap. She unclasped them to reveal the lion-talisman crouching there, unchanged. Her eyes opened and, after a moment in which she gazed blankly at the two of us standing either side of her doorway, she came back to herself.

  ‘It is getting late,’ she said. ‘Home before dark.’

  We were being dismissed like children. The inner chill I’d felt while she was telling the story was starting to fade, to be replaced by the outer cold of the evening. I wanted to thank her, even if I wasn’t quite sure of the meaning of what she had told us. I gestured at the talisman in her hand.

  ‘What do I need it for, Agnes?’ she said, passing it back to me. ‘I do not suffer from the stone and I am not choleric. Take it back and give it someone who has need of it.’

  Even so, I was reluctant to take the thing and she sensed it was because I was frightened of the talisman brooch now and considered it unlucky. Mistress Travis said, ‘There is nothing to fear here. It was created to ward off harm and some small trace of that remains. The person who lost it under the trees cannot touch you.’

  I reflected that I had already kept the talisman secret for the whole summer without coming to grief and so I took it back and thanked her in my stumbling way. Laurence said nothing. We turned away from the hut and threaded a path back through the woods. It was fortunate we were together and that we were not children, despite Mistress Travis’s words, for otherwise we might have been fearful of the gathering shadows and the sounds of animals settling down or stirring themselves for the night.

  We waited until we’d reached the boundary of the woods before talking about the cunning-woman. Laurence was of the opinion that it was all nonsense. He said that Mistress Travis hadn’t denied being near the place where the murder occurred. Either she was making things up or possibly she had glimpsed somebody lurking under the trees by the stile but had no idea who it was. I reminded him that Mistress Travis mentioned the rope. She couldn’t have seen that from a distance. The rope wasn’t a secret, he said. Everybody knew how Thomas Flytte had died. The coroner had pronounced on it. In truth, the cunning-woman had seen nothing, she knew nothing. All that business with stroking the talisman and pretending to go into a trance was nothing more than foolery, designed to impress us, and all for the sake of – of . . .

  ‘Yes, Laurence,’ I said, ‘all for the sake of – what? Tell me. Because she didn’t want any money or gifts from us. She wouldn’t even keep the talisman. She was still speaking to us as children almost, telling us to get off home before dark. We are hardly worth impressing.’

  There was a silence and I could tell he wasn’t pleased.

  ‘All right,’ he said. ‘Then, if we do believe her, it must be the cunning-woman herself who was under the trees by the stile. She was the one lying in wait for Thomas Flytte. Everyone knows she had a grudge against the physician. She’s strong enough to have overpowered him and pulled a c
ord round his neck and choked him. You know some people say she’s really a man.’

  ‘And others say that she’s a nun. But it didn’t happen like that at all. She held the talisman in her hands and, because of that, she was able to see through the eyes of . . . the person who possessed it at the time. Through those eyes, she saw Thomas Flytte crossing the field at a run because it was raining, she saw him pass in front of her and then pause in front of the stile. Or rather ‘she’ didn’t see all this but . . .’

  ‘Have you tried to do that thing, Agnes?’ said Laurence, ignoring everything I’d been saying. ‘Go on, hold the wretched object, rub it tenderly and see if you have any visions.’

  ‘Don’t be stupid, Laurence. I haven’t got the gift. Even her enemies admit that Mistress Travis has the gift.’

  ‘Answer me this, then. Why did she suddenly stop at the very point in her story where she was about to tell us what happened? According to you, she can see or pretends she can see through the eyes of the person who is spying on the physician while he strides across the field. Thomas Flytte pauses as he gets to the stile, and then this “person” goes and does . . . whatever it is he does. How convenient that she cannot tell us anything that really matters. She does not see the murder, she does not see the murderer.’

  ‘Not convenient, just fortunate,’ I said.