The Deadliest Sin

by The Medieval Murderers

  ‘You’re talking as much nonsense as the cunning-woman.’

  I wasn’t talking nonsense and Laurence knew it, I think. It was fortunate that the cunning-woman had not seen everything in her vision. It meant that the truth was still half-hidden, which was more comfortable for both of us.

  ‘I have been thinking about why Mistress Travis couldn’t see the murder being done,’ I said, ‘and it makes sense. I can explain it.’

  ‘Nothing makes sense,’ he said. I waited for him to ask for my explanation, which I was rather pleased with, but he said nothing more. So I was forced to speak instead.

  ‘Remember I told you I found the talisman under the trees, not by the stile? It was close to the foot-marks. I measured those against the boots of Thomas Flytte and it was obvious from the length of them that he was not the person waiting in the spinney. He was shorter than that person. Which confirms the cunning-woman’s words. She was looking through the eyes of someone watching the physician. Even the words she used weren’t her own thoughts and feelings, but his. It was his hatred and anger boiling over. His idea that the physician’s legs were going like knives. But she could only do that for as long as the man under the trees was holding the talisman. When he no longer had the talisman with him then she could no longer see with his eyes. The talisman is her link to . . . that person.’

  I paused, waiting for him to agree, but also to catch up with my own rushing thoughts. Then a further detail occurred to me. ‘Or probably, he wasn’t holding the lion-talisman in his hand but he had it somewhere about him, in a pocket or fastened to his belt, and in his hurry and anger as he reached for the piece of rope, which he kept with him – remember Mistress Travis talked of the rope at her side, though it wasn’t her side but his – he accidentally dislodged it and it dropped to the ground—’

  ‘Where it was conveniently found by Agnes Rath,’ said Laurence, breaking his silence. There was almost a harshness in his tone.

  I said, ‘Don’t you believe me, Laurence? I found the talisman where I said I did, and the foot-marks, too. I have told you no lie but only the precise truth.’

  After a few moments, he said, ‘I believe you,’ and this time there was no harshness in his voice but only regret perhaps. We were out in the open by now and coming to the point where he would have to follow his path back to his house while I went off to mine. It was half dark, and I was glad to be out of the woods.

  ‘It could have been the pedlar Hugh standing in the spinney by the stile, or Reeve,’ said Laurence.

  ‘I don’t think so,’ I said. It didn’t seem to me as though the shoe-marks I’d seen could belong to either of those ragged individuals.

  ‘Very well,’ he said. ‘But whoever it was who was standing there, why did . . . that person attack Thomas Flytte?’

  ‘Do you remember the cunning-woman’s words?’

  ‘Oh, are we back to her again?’

  ‘When she described what she saw with the help of the talisman, she didn’t talk about anyone by name but simply ‘him’. He was moving fast along the path on account of the rain. His legs were going like knives until they stopped for an instant in front of the stile. But the man under the trees couldn’t see clearly. The rain was coming down hard. He had to wipe his eyes to clear them and still he couldn’t see properly. His anger cast a shadow over his vision.’

  ‘Yes, yes,’ said Laurence impatiently. ‘What does that mean?’

  ‘It means,’’ I said, ‘that whoever was lying in wait in the spinney was not expecting to see Thomas Flytte. They were expecting someone else.’

  We’d come to the point where the paths divided and Laurence went his way and I went mine, without exchanging another word. When I got home, my father was by the gate to the garden as if waiting for my return. He drew me to one side by the water butts under the thatch. He wanted a private talk, away from my brothers and sisters. He asked whether I’d been with Laurence. In the old days, I wouldn’t have dared tell him but now the hostility between the two families seemed to have . . . not died away, exactly . . . but the heat and anger had been replaced by a sort of cold sadness.

  I didn’t tell my father we’d been to visit the cunning-woman but I didn’t deny I’d spent a couple of hours with Laurence Carter either. In case he thought I was slacking, I said that my duties in the house were done and my mother, from her sickbed, had not told me to do anything else. My father waved his hand as though none of this mattered. He seemed curious rather than angry. He even asked after Laurence’s mother and father. I was not able to tell him anything at all beyond what I’d heard from my friend, that Alice Carter had grown very talkative while William Carter was even more silent than usual. It was almost dark and I sensed rather than saw my father’s unease at that point, and I caught some words he muttered under his breath. They sounded like, ‘I should not have done it.’ He saw me looking at him and quickly said something about the alehouse and the piece of rope, and I realised he was harking back to that morning when the hatred between the Carters and the Raths had taken poisonous root. The moment when he’d exposed William for a miser, and a ridiculous one at that. I had not been present, unlike Laurence, but the story was known throughout the village of Wenham.

  Then my father turned aside, as if he was done with questioning me, and went back indoors. Before I followed him in, I went to the privy-hut, not only because I needed to go there but because my hiding-place for the talisman was a small heap of stones behind the hut. I did not dare carry the talisman with me for fear of losing it, as the person standing under the trees had lost it. The pile of stones behind the privy seemed best. After I’d hidden the talisman, I went inside. I ate something. I went to bed.

  I could not sleep among my little brothers and sisters but lay awake listening to their gentle breathing and occasional whimpers. The autumn wind banged the shutters. I thought of what we had discovered, Laurence and I, at the cunning-woman’s. I thought of my father’s words, ‘I should not have done it’, and his too quick explanation that he was referring to the business in the alehouse and the length of rope that William Carter had plucked from a muddy path. In my mind’s eye, I saw the path that ran from the Carters’ to the Raths’ and went beneath a stile, and I thought how, though that path was used only by Laurence and me, yet it appeared curiously worn and trodden on. I remembered something Laurence had told me a little time ago about an odd encounter he’d witnessed in Church Lane between my father and Alice Carter. None of these thoughts made it any easier for me to get to sleep, though I must have done for the next I knew a bright morning light was squeezing through the cracks in the shutters, and so began a terrible new day. And the end of the story.

  Agnes paused and the Walsingham pilgrims thought she was merely catching her breath. But, no, judging by the way she looked across at her husband, it seemed as though her part was finished and that the landlord was expected to take up the reins of the story again. Laurence Carter ducked his head in acknowledgement and once more stood to address the group while his wife resumed her old place towards the rear of the audience. Not a few of the listeners regarded the landlord of the Angel in a new light. They saw him as young man, the lover of Agnes, slight and eager. And all of them wondered what was going to happen next. His wife’s reference to a ‘terrible new day’ sounded very promising.

  ‘Thank you, my dear,’ he said to Agnes. ‘It is more or less as she says, our story. Though I do not recall that I was so unwilling to go and see the cunning-woman in the woods. In my memory it was Agnes who had to be encouraged. But never mind that. It was I who witnessed what occurred on the following day, and I will never forget the things I saw.’

  Harvest time was over and all was being secured for the winter. I was working in the hayloft of the barn, which was near our house. I was helping a man called Ralf, who my father had instructed to patch up some rotten planking in the wall. He was using the wood and nails from a broken cart of ours, and I was doing the fetching and carrying for him, toting lengths of
wood across the yard and into the barn and up the ladder to the loft and then down again for more. In truth, it was not very onerous work and Ralf let me carry it out at my own pace, which is more than my father would have done. It was a fine early morning in autumn, with the sun low and blazing in the sky, and burning off the mist. It was warm too. It felt like a mockery of the whole rain-soaked year.

  Ralf had removed the rotten pieces from the external wall and cut the wood back evenly so he’d have a sound frame for his repairs. He was kneeling on the floor by the space he’d created, his tools spread around him. The morning sun streamed through and tempted me to lie down on a pile of sacking in the far corner. Ralf’s back was turned and I was about to take a short rest after bringing up the final load of wood when he said: ‘Who’s that? What’s the matter with him?’

  There was enough concern in his voice to bring me to his side. I crouched down next to Ralf and looked. The barn was set to one side of the farmhouse and off behind it. In front of us was the little fenced herb garden, which ran alongside the house and which it was my mother’s job to tend. My father, William, was standing at the corner of the garden and staring to the east over the fence palings. He was cupping his hands round his eyes so as to see more easily against the glare of the sun. In the hazy distance was the figure of a man. If he was approaching our farm, he was doing so in a strange, looping style, sometimes veering off the path into one of the fields and then coming back again, sometimes running for a few steps before slowing down to a walk. At one point, he stopped altogether and seemed to be dancing a jig to music that only he could hear.

  ‘Jesus, who is it?’ said Ralf. He turned his head and looked at me. He had a grooved forehead with heavy brows, as though his own head had been hewn out of wood. I shrugged to show that I didn’t know who it was approaching.

  Every village has its share of people who behave oddly, which is perhaps only to say that they don’t behave like the rest of us. I was familiar with two or three from Wenham like that, and I knew their shapes and their walks, but this figure was not one of them. It must have been a trick of the light, for with the sun behind him the figure seemed to be on fire himself, red flames leaping off his body. I glanced down at my father. He had lowered his hands from his face and he stood stock-still, grasping the fence. I had the odd feeling that he was waiting.

  It was only when the figure was very close indeed that I saw with horror that it was Reeve, the servant of Thomas Flytte. Reeve, the bastard son who’d disappeared at around the time of the physician’s murder and who was reckoned by quite a few in the village to be responsible for it. I didn’t recognise him for several reasons. I never expected to see him again, and certainly not emerging from the mists of a fine autumn morning. And whatever it was he’d been doing in the months since his father’s death, wherever he’d been hiding himself away, none of it had been to his benefit. He’d always been as thin as one of the fence palings that my father was grasping with both hands. Now I could see his ribs, the bones in his arms, his head like a ball on a stick. He was wearing almost nothing. Rags around his feet, a cloth knotted about his middle, some leaves woven in his hair. Worst of all though was that his bare, famished body was painted in streaks and tongues of red. It was this and his strange, jumping progress that made me think he was wreathed in flames. I have never seen anything like it except for many years afterwards watching a play in Norwich. One of the devils on the stage had just the look of Reeve and I could not stay in the market square but had to leave off watching.

  The red paint on Reeve’s tattered body was blood. Beside me I heard Ralf gasp and some sound came from the back of my throat. Still my father did not move or even flinch. He did not run back to the house where my mother, Alice, was with two small children, a brother and sister to me. For all I knew, there were others inside. I would have shouted out a warning but I could not get my tongue to work. Reeve halted a few feet in front of William. He stood there unnaturally still after all his jerky moving and he stared at my father, who said something. I could not pick up the words clearly because his back was to me and he was speaking low, but they sounded like, ‘It is come, then’ or, ‘You are come, then.’

  After that, there was a silence that seemed to last for many minutes but must have been only a few seconds. The silence was broken by a scream. It came from somewhere out of sight but I knew it was my mother at the door of the farmhouse, gazing at her husband and the blood-stained man. William glanced sideways in the direction of the scream and after that things happened very quickly.

  From under the cloth about his middle, Reeve produced a knife. Its blade flashed in the sun. He stepped forward and, using both hands, raised it high in the air and brought it down in the centre of my father’s chest. I heard the thud of the blow and a great gasp from my father as the air was pushed out of him and he staggered backwards. He fell next to a rosemary bush in the herb garden. The dagger stuck out of his chest. His legs and arms were flailing in the dark green of the rosemary. Another scream came from my mother, and that broke the spell that had kept Ralf and me crouching at the hayloft opening. We turned and scrambled down the ladder, through the barn and out into the open air. By now, Reeve had turned and was running away from what he had done. I heard a chink of something striking the ground and saw that Ralf had thrown a chisel but it landed far short of the fleeing man. Reeve ran along the same path as the one he’d come on. He did not shift around or pause for a jig this time but ran for his life until he was lost in the haze of the morning.

  Meantime, my mother had reached my father’s body and I stood beside her, confused and uncertain what to do. She was wringing her hands and moaning. William was still alive but there was a bubbling sound emerging from his slack mouth and the blood was welling up around the dagger, which had gone in almost to the hilt. It quivered with his dying breaths. His tunic was already soaked. I rushed inside to get something to stanch the flow, telling my little brother and sister that they were on no account to come outside. But by the time I returned to the herb-bed with some rags clutched in my hand, it was all over. My mother was kneeling beside William, one bloody hand spread over his chest and the other stroking his forehead.

  Ralf the carpenter had set off in pursuit of Reeve but the mad man was far too quick for him and he gave up within a few minutes and returned to the farmhouse together with a couple of men from the fields. He had retrieved his chisel and now he was wielding it like a dagger. Very soon others arrived, drawn by my mother’s cries or by the sense that something was wrong. In a stumbling way, Ralf and I told them what had happened and told it again and the numbers of men around the palings of the herb garden grew until we had a large enough band to go in pursuit of Reeve. There were women too by now, consoling Alice and tending to the corpse even though it could not be moved until the Thetford coroner arrived. Among us was Alfred Rath, Agnes’s father. He talked quietly to my mother, and his words sounded soothing though I’m not sure she was listening. I thought it showed Christian charity in him that he should be here so quickly to help at the house of an old enemy.

  Alfred thought more clearly than any of us. He said that from our description of Reeve and his naked state he could not have been living anywhere close to the village, otherwise he would surely have been seen before now. True, he might have been hiding out in one of the tumbledown buildings dotted around Wenham, but most of them were used for storage or plundered for their wood and stone, and so wouldn’t have provided a safe lair. The obvious hiding-place – the only place – was the Great Wood. And that was the direction he’d run towards. Alfred took charge and issued commands. He strode across to the barn where Ralf had been doing his repairs and directed us to pick up whatever implements we could for the hue and cry. Ralf was quick to protect his tools in the hayloft but he did present me with his chisel, telling me to keep it safe. He equipped himself with a stave.

  By now there were at least three dozen men and boys gathered together, and all of us eager to give chase. I was so
distracted by the hurry and excitement that I had almost no time to think of the death of the man who was my step-father. Later, I grieved, though not for long. Now we set off across the fields, half striding, half running. Almost everybody was clutching a weapon of some sort: staves, clubs, pitchforks, knives. From what we’d seen, Ralf and I, it did not seem as though Reeve could still be armed. He’d left his dagger planted in William Carter’s chest, and his clothing was so tattered that there was no place for anything else. Yet, even if unarmed, he was still very dangerous: he was an outcast and a murderer, a man almost naked, painted with blood, and possessed by spirits.

  The sun had burned off the mist and we were sweating by the time we reached the boundary of the Great Wood, where Agnes and I had visited Mistress Travis the day before. She lived in a different part, opposite to the Raths’ farm, where it was less densely wooded and there were more paths. Even so, I worried for her in the woods with Reeve on the loose, and I wondered at this because yesterday I had been afraid of her and her visions. Now, Alfred Rath halted us on the edge of the trees and split us up into four groups, directing one to go left and one to the right and search inside the boundary, while the other two were to penetrate deeper into the trees, one veering to the east, the other west. He told us to stay tight within our own group and to judge our direction as best we could by the glimpses of the sun. Though the trees were bare, they were clustered together in many places, making it hard to see far.

  I was with Ralf and, by chance, we were part of the band that was heading north-east, though any idea of direction stopped meaning much when we were crashing through the undergrowth and fanning out to cover as much ground as possible. We whooped and we shouted and some banged their staves against the tree trunks, as if we were trying to flush out the quarry from his hiding-place through the sheer din of the thing. Yet for all the noise and the company, Ralf and I found ourselves somehow separated from the others.