The Deadliest Sin

by The Medieval Murderers

  We followed a narrow path that was piled thick and slippery with yellow leaves until we were brought up short by a pool of blackish water. Only when we stopped to look for the best way round it did we realise that we were alone. In the distance we could hear the whoops and cries of the others. Then the noises died away and we heard nothing apart from the creaking branches and some rustling in the undergrowth. It was as if there had never been anyone in the Great Wood but Ralf and me – and Reeve, most likely. I felt my scalp prickling and my hand tightened round the chisel, which I still held. Ralf prodded at the black pool with his stave and it bubbled and gave off a terrible stench. He looked at me from under his heavy brows and I saw that he was as frightened as I was. For all the thickness of the trees there was some light on the floor of the forest on account of the fine morning. Abruptly, it grew dark. It was only the sun going behind a cloud but the sudden gloom added to my fear. I looked up and I must have gasped or cried out for I was conscious of Ralf staring at me in horror before he too turned his head upwards.

  Immediately above us dangled an object that I couldn’t make out. Then I saw that it was a pair of naked feet, all clenched and curled up in agony like the feet of our saviour on the cross. Ralf and I staggered back and away from the pool of black water. Once the first shock had subsided, we were able to see more clearly. Hanging from a branch far above us was the body of the man called Reeve. He was absolutely naked now, though he was all scrawled over with the streaks of dried blood. I could scarcely see his face, he hung so far above us, but it lolled down as if he was regarding us from his great height and with his tongue stuck out.

  We ran a few yards down the path and shouted. I don’t know what we said. I was very glad when some of the others came in answer to our cries, and most glad of all to see Alfred Rath. My companion, Ralf, pointed with his arm stiff and outstretched and then it seemed as though every man and boy in Wenham was crowding through the trees and down the path and teetering on the edge of the black pool and shoving each other aside so as to get a better view of the hanged man.

  After that there was no real part for me to play. All work in the fields and in the village stopped with the double deaths and the arrival of the Thetford coroner. My father’s body was removed from the herb garden and laid out in our house, with Master John in attendance. Some time later during the day Reeve’s body was cut down. It was Ralf who offered to climb the tree. I think he felt that as he, with me, had been the first to glimpse the body he should be the one to retrieve it. He used the ladder from our hayloft. I helped him carry it across the fields and into the Great Wood. He climbed up the dead man’s tree and crawled along the stout branch, and with a knife cut through the knots holding up the body. Reeve had hanged himself with the lengths of rag he wore about his middle or wrapped around his feet. Once Ralf severed the ragged noose, the body plunged down and landed half in the pool of black water. Several people who’d been standing too close were spattered with the stinking mud, to the amusement of the rest of us.

  Although everybody treated that day as a kind of grim holiday, running between houses and standing gossiping on corners, the alehouse did good business. There was more talk about Reeve than about my father. People shuddered and looked over their shoulders and crossed themselves and said the murderer could not be human, but a monster or a devil in human shape. They said he must have been living wild in the Great Wood – which was surely true – catching and killing small animals to eat raw and besmearing himself with their blood and his own, for he had many cuts and wounds across his body. I remembered the time I’d seen him emerging from the shadows, holding a dead rabbit and giving his little smile.

  It was Reeve, of course, who had killed Thomas Flytte in the springtime, choking the life out of the physician and leaving his body draped over the stile between the Carters’ land and the Raths’. Although almost no one was aware that he was more than a servant or companion to the physician but instead Thomas’s bastard son, everyone remembered the way he’d trailed after his master like a sullen dog. Everyone remembered his silent stare. As to why he had stabbed my stepfather, that was no mystery at all. If Reeve was a devil, then this was what devils did. If he was human, which was doubtful, then he must be mad or possessed, and it was well known that such individuals behaved in ways that were completely beyond reason or explanation. It was a mercy that he had hanged himself and saved the gallows an extra burden.

  William Carter was buried in proper fashion in the churchyard, with all due ceremony. Master John reminded us that life was short and fragile – as if we needed reminding! My mother paid for Mass to be said daily for my father. I do not know what happened to Reeve’s corpse. Somebody suggested it should be left where it had fallen by the black pond, which was dark and stinky enough to be one of the mouths of hell. But this was not enough for those men in the village who wanted to dispose of it so that it could never return to trouble us. They dumped the body in the back of a cart and took it off somewhere distant from Wenham, as if to remove the taint altogether from the village. They were gone for more than a day and when they returned not a one of them would say what they’d done with it. Perhaps they burned the corpse. Perhaps they buried it at a crossroads after driving a stake through the heart.

  No one asked Ralf or me what we’d witnessed from the hayloft, beyond requiring the bare details from us, which we repeated again and again. The figure with the sun behind him, the body streaked with blood, the flashing knife. I didn’t tell anyone of the words that I thought my father had uttered as he faced Reeve – ‘It is come, then’ or, ‘You are come, then’ – for the words made no sense. No more sense than the way my father stood there without moving while Reeve came closer. He didn’t try to defend himself, he didn’t rush inside and bar the door. Normally, my father was prickly and quick to take offence. He was a choleric man. But on this final occasion he had stayed to be slaughtered like a tethered beast.

  My mother’s grief at my father’s death did not last so long. By the next summer, she had married, for the third time. Her husband was – Alfred Rath. For Joan had died before the Christmas of that year. So the two families that had been at odds for so long were joined together, after a fashion. Agnes and I became like cousins, true cousins, and no one cared now what we did or how much time we spent together.

  A lot has happened in the intervening years, other deaths and births as well. All our parents are dead now, and the land that we farmed is held by our brothers, while Agnes and I are settled here at the Angel. We’ve often thought about what occurred during that summer and together we have pieced together a kind of story.

  ‘The story is like this,’ said Agnes, speaking from the back of the room, so the listeners once more had to crane their heads. ‘It might even be true. The individual waiting under the spinney by the stile was William Carter, the stepfather to Laurence. William hated Alfred Rath, on account of their long-lasting quarrels and differences, and especially because of the business of the rope in the alehouse. But above all he hated his neighbour because he suspected something was afoot between his wife, Alice, and Alfred. He could not keep watch on her all the time, he had too much to attend to, but his suspicions grew stronger all the time.’

  Agnes Carter stopped and now her husband began to speak. From now on each spoke a few sentences as if they were sharing the tale, as if they really had created it together. Sometimes the Walsingham pilgrims weren’t even sure which one was speaking, man or wife.

  Eventually, William Carter convinces himself that what he fears and suspects is so, and he decides to act. He knows that the most out-of-the-way path between their two properties is across the overgrown stile. After witnessing the couple meeting in Church Lane that morning, he determines to keep watch near the stile. Were they arguing about boundaries – or were they having a lovers’ quarrel? He listens to his wife, Alice, talk about inspecting the hedges and fences and the request from Alfred to meet there. She won’t go, of course. Or will she?

  He wa
lks out in the afternoon and reaches the boundary between his land – his wife’s land! – and he slips over the stile because he wants to catch Alfred Rath all unawares. He shelters under the spinney. While he waits, the rain pours down and the anger boils up within him until it can no longer be contained. When he glimpses a figure he thinks it is Alfred Rath, because of the man’s size and because of the clothes he is wearing. The man under the trees fumbles for the piece of rope he has carried for just this moment – what better way to dispose of an enemy than with an item like the one he taunted you with? – and as he does this he lets fall the talisman which the physician had given him as a preventative against the stone and choler and other hot conditions. He runs out of his hiding-place and overpowers Alfred as he stands for an instant before the stile. Except that the man is not Alfred Rath but Thomas Flytte, who has been lent a mantle by Alfred. In the madness of his attack, William does not realise this. Perhaps he does not see what he’s done until he has choked the doctor and thrown his body head-first across the stile. Perhaps it is not until later that he realises with horror that he has killed the wrong man.

  Luckily for him, there are other possible culprits to hand, like the pedlar Hugh Tanner and the servant Reeve. Both are missing and either of them might have murdered Thomas Flytte. Yet William Carter has not got away with it. He suffers in silence, or an even greater silence than usual. His wife is perhaps uneasily aware of her part in all of this, as is Alfred Rath. That is what her father means when he says to Agnes, ‘I should not have done it.’ He is not talking about the rope and the alehouse but about his . . . link with Alice Carter. Unhappiness has descended on both families. Joan too pays a penalty even though she has done nothing, and it may be the reason she slowly fades from our sight.

  So when William sees Reeve emerging out of the sun and mist that morning, it was as if he’d been expecting him. How else to explain the way he stayed fixed to the spot or to understand those strange words he uttered: ‘You are come, then’? He did not try to run away or to avoid the blow. It was the punishment he felt he deserved, even if he might not have known it was coming at the hands of the physician’s son. And there we have Reeve’s motive, too. He wasn’t a demon or a man possessed by one. He must have witnessed his father’s murder or appeared in the aftermath of the scene. He alone knew who was responsible, and that it was William Carter. Reeve took refuge in the Great Wood where he went mad in his own fashion until that morning when he appeared clad in rags and armed with a knife to take his vengeance. He was angry. But not as angry as William Carter when he brooded over the wrongs done to him by his neighbour. In the end, his rage blinded him and he killed an innocent man, an act that led to the deaths of others as well as himself.

  ‘So you see, ladies and gentlemen,’ concluded the landlord of the Angel, ‘why it is that I say anger is the worst of the seven sins. Like the other sins, it blinds us to our faults and even causes us to believe we are acting rightfully. Then it takes us further, urging us to pick up the nearest implement and to turn our rage into deeds. The injury we do ourselves is made many times worse by the injury we do to others.’

  ‘And here,’ said the landlady of the Angel, ‘is a token of our story.’

  From the depths of her dark red gown, Agnes Carter produced a small object. She lifted and turned it so that it glittered gold in the candlelight. She held it out to the nearest pilgrim.

  ‘Go on, please,’ she said. ‘Touch the talisman and pass it round. Observe the image of the lion. It is good for the stone and for those of a choleric disposition. A cunning-woman held that thing and it told her a story. Perhaps it will tell one of you another story, a different one.’

  The Sixth Sin

  The storytelling was now taken up by an individual called Nicholas Hangfield. It was he who had attempted to speak to Janyn Hussett, the veteran of Crécy, at the very beginning. He was a quiet, good-natured fellow in his thirties, stocky and with dark hair. He explained that he’d been born in Bristol but that he’d moved to London, where he worked as a shipping clerk. He liked being near the water and he liked the sight of boats, though you’d never have caught him actually boarding one. Bristol was one of the places in the west where the plague was supposed to have struck and people looked expectantly at Nicholas as though he might have news for them, but he said that he had no family living there now and thus was no better informed than any of them.

  ‘My father, William, God rest his soul, told me this tale many times, especially when I was a child – and when he was bed-fast for months, dying of a creeping inflammation of his lungs.

  ‘In his prime, he had been one of the serjeants of the Sheriff of Somerset, living in Bristol where I was born and brought up. Not yet thirty years ago, in the fifteenth year of the reign of the second Edward, he had been assigned by the sheriff to be an officer to the county coroner and he served him for a considerable time. My father came to know about all the violent, unusual and suspicious deaths in the city and regaled me with many remarkable tales. One story in particular intrigued me and every detail has stuck in my memory – so much so that in many idle moments, I contrived my own conception of the affair, seeing the people in my mind’s eye and hearing their voices in my imagination, until I built up a kind of play or masque in my head that was as good as reality. My theme is . . .

  Envy

  One sunny afternoon in late spring, Robert Giffard was lying on a bench in the garden behind his burgage in High Street, listlessly watching his servant place a goblet on a stool alongside him. It contained no fine wine, but a sour concoction that he himself had ordered the man to make up in his dispensary at the front of the house.

  ‘Had we enough mother-wort in stock, Edward? We were running low.’ Robert’s voice was weak as he reached for the glass, but Edward Stogursey nodded reassuringly.

  ‘Enough for another dozen potions, sir. And plenty of valerian, too.’

  He was the physician’s house steward and personal servant, but also acted as his lay assistant in the practice. A stocky man with a square face and cropped brown hair, he had an impassive manner that rarely showed any emotion. As far as he knew himself, he was about thirty years old, but as he had been left as a foundling in the porch of Stogursey Priory, he had no knowledge of the date of his birth. A local widow had taken him in and given him the name of their village in the Quantock Hills, adding the royal Edward for good measure.

  As he walked back to the house, he stood aside deferentially as his master’s wife hurried out of the door and made for where her husband lay in the sunny part of the long, narrow garden.

  ‘Robert, are you sure this is safe to drink?’ she asked anxiously, as she picked up the glass and sniffed at it suspiciously. Eleanor Giffard was a tall, slender woman, a decade younger than her husband’s forty years. Glossy black hair peeped from beneath a linen coif, framing a smooth, oval face that had a hint of Latin ancestry.

  ‘It was made to my own prescription, dear woman,’ he replied slowly, as she took a sip of the brown fluid, then made a grimace of disgust.

  ‘It’s horrible! You know how careful you must be. We should get an extra taster, after what happened in February.’

  Her husband made limp gesture of dismissal. ‘Edward always tries everything first – and so far, he has remained hale and hearty.’

  Somewhat reluctantly, she replaced the goblet on the stool and bent down to rearrange the pillow that cushioned Robert’s head.

  ‘You claimed then that someone was trying to poison you,’ she said accusingly, ‘and now you are ill again.’

  ‘This is quite different from that time,’ he countered, a hint of irritation strengthening his tone. ‘Then I had yellow jaundice from an excess of bile in my liver. This time, I have palpitations, cramps and trembling. If I am being poisoned, then I intend to defeat it by taking nothing but simple food and drink that cannot be adulterated.’

  Eleanor delicately lifted her skirts from the ground and sat down at the end of the bench alongside
his feet.

  ‘It seems beyond belief that anyone in Bristol would wish you harm, Robert! You do so much good in treating many people.’

  ‘Perhaps too many! That may be the problem,’ he murmured obscurely.

  His wife’s smooth brow creased in perplexity. ‘Too many? How can that be?’

  ‘There are those who are jealous of my success, as you well know. They are envious of the number and quality of my patients and would wish to gather some of them for themselves.’

  Eleanor shook her head dismissively. ‘You have said this before, Robert, but I can’t believe that your colleagues would contemplate murder just to further their own ambitions!’

  The physician gave a wry smile. ‘They are not my colleagues, lady – they are my competitors! Just as a baker or a tanner competes for trade with his fellows, my medical brothers would cut each other’s throats to gain a dozen more patients.’

  The handsome woman considered this for a moment. ‘I admit that I don’t like any of them much – though that scrawny William Blundus seems modest enough and popular with the common folk.’

  ‘Then he might have most to gain from having more patients, especially ones who could pay,’ said Edward, cynically. ‘But I wouldn’t trust the other two, either. Humphrey de Cockville is too full of his own importance and would kill to have some of my richer customers.’

  ‘What about Erasmus Crote?’ asked Eleanor. ‘He’s such a whining, miserable fellow that I could easily see him hatching some devious plot.’

  Her husband shrugged and winced as his muscles cramped with the movement. ‘Of course, it may be someone who has nothing to do with doctoring. Maybe you have a secret lover who lusts after you and wants to get rid of an inconvenient husband!’

  Eleanor reddened and stood up. ‘Don’t jest about it, Edward! I think we should get an experienced physician from outside Bristol to see you. Perhaps you are suffering from some obscure disease, and not being poisoned at all. That was your diagnosis, but even you are not infallible.’