The Deadliest Sin

by The Medieval Murderers

  ‘Best get him taken on a handcart up to the dead-house in the castle, where we can have a better look, before he gets a pauper’s burial,’ he said, rocking back on his heels. He looked around the derelict room and then frowned. ‘It’s strange that he has such good clothing upon him. This cote-hardie is of best wool under the dirt. Odd that such a beggar as this would be so well-dressed, unless he stole the clothing.’

  Egbert agreed, pointing to the man’s footwear. ‘Those boots are very fine, if you like toes as pointed as that. They must have cost a few shillings – and they are hardly worn, if you ignore the rat bites.’

  William looked more closely at the boots, which were of fine soft leather. In a number of places, this had been nibbled away, the edges being serrated, typical of rat bites, which were also present on the old man’s face and hands. The woollen hose underneath was exposed in places, ripped and torn by the rodents’ sharp teeth.

  Something in William’s memory clicked into place as he recalled helping the boot-boy shift some of his master’s clothing.

  ‘I wonder if he got these from the monks in St James’s?’ he said to Egbert. ‘The widow of Robert Giffard gave away a lot of clothes for charity.’

  The watchman shrugged. ‘Maybe, but this poor old soul didn’t enjoy them for long.’

  He suddenly turned away and stamped hard on the floor with his heavy boot. William saw that he had crushed the head of a rat, which had still been moving slightly.

  ‘May as well put the thing out of its misery,’ he said laconically, showing a compassion that was unusual in that day and age.

  William looked more closely at the rats on the floor. There were three that were obviously stone-dead, though not decomposed in any way. Then his eye caught a movement under a pile of rubbish and he saw another rodent, twitching and jerking slightly, its back arching spasmodically. Then it sudden went limp and lay still, obviously dead.

  ‘What’s killing these vermin?’ asked Egbert. ‘Is there something poisonous amongst this rubbish?’

  The coroner’s officer rubbed his stubbly chin thoughtfully. ‘You may be nearer the truth than you imagine, Egbert. Let’s get this old fellow’s cadaver taken back to the castle dead-house as soon as we can, before he goes off any further.’

  The watchman went off to the quayside to commandeer a handcart to shift the corpse up to the castle, where a leanto shed in the outer bailey was provided as a temporary mortuary for bodies awaiting burial. While he was away, William found an old sack amongst the debris in the hut and dropped the four dead rats into it, carefully picking them up by the tails, using a piece of rag to protect his fingers from any noxious substance that might be exuding from them.

  An hour later, they had pulled the clothing from the beggar, not without a few choice oaths at the smell both of the putrefaction and of the filthy state of the old man, whose last wash must have been long before the King’s coronation. The boots and brown woollen hose were placed in a clean sack, the rest bundled up and put on a shelf in the deadhouse.

  After thanking Egbert for his help, William went off to report to Ralph fitz Urse about his suspicions that there might be a connection between the beggar’s death and the tragedy at the Giffard household. At first, the surly coroner ridiculed even the faint possibility that the two events might be related, but in the absence of any better explanation, fitz Urse grudgingly agreed to his officer following up any leads that might strengthen the suspicion.

  The first place that Hangfield went was St James’s Priory, to enquire what happened to the clothing that the compassionate Eleanor Giffard had caused to be sent to them. He found a lay brother who worked for the almoner, who dealt with alms and all other charitable activities. This man, himself a Bristolian, knew at once who had been given some of the clothing.

  ‘So old Gilbert is dead, is he?’ he exclaimed. ‘May God rest his soul; he deserves it after the poor life he had. He was an archer in the King’s army years ago, but fell on hard times.’

  William, anxious to strengthen his tenuous case, cut short the brother’s reminiscences. ‘So you say it is certain that the boots and hose, together with a cote-hardie that you gave him, came from Mistress Giffard?’

  The other man nodded. ‘No doubt at all. It was I who received the bundle from that young lad who brought it from the physician’s house – and I handed some of it on to old Gilbert.’

  Satisfied that he was at least confirming some of the links in the chain, William’s next stop was the apothecary’s shop in Corn Street. He carried the sack containing the boots and hose in one hand and, because of the stink, left it outside the door whilst he went in to seek Matthew Herbert.

  The apothecary listened patiently while William explained the events of the morning and his idea that there might be some connection between the clothing and the death of both the beggar and the physician.

  ‘It was the dead rats and especially the way one of them died that struck me,’ he said earnestly. ‘The spasms and the twitching, then suddenly dropping dead, was similar to what happened to Robert Giffard. Surely, the fact that the clothing came from that house and was given to the beggar, who died soon afterwards, could be significant?’

  Matthew was too polite a man to have the same scathing reaction that the coroner had shown, but he wondered if Hangfield’s devotion to his duties was stronger than the evidence he was proposing. However, he was intrigued enough to humour the officer.

  ‘You say you have brought these boots and the hose with you?’

  William nodded. ‘I left them outside on the street – I doubt anyone will have stolen them, as they smell quite badly.’

  ‘Bring them through to the back yard, where we can stay in fresh air.’

  When William brought the sack through, he found Matthew sitting on a bench in the small cobbled area behind the shop. He had brought a metal tray, which he placed on the ground and asked the coroner’s officer to place the boots and hose upon it. The smell was not too bad in the open air and William first lifted out the boots to show Matthew.

  ‘See the way those rats had devoured parts of the softer leather of the uppers?’ he said, pointing with a finger. ‘They must have found it tasty, as about a quarter of the boot has gone.’

  ‘And you say the hose was poking out of the holes?’

  William nodded, pulling out one thigh-length stocking from the sack. ‘Those vermin had chewed part of this as well; there’s a hole in the toe where it was sticking out of the shredded boot.’

  The apothecary studied the items, peering into the boot, apparently oblivious of the slimy state of the inside. He poked around with his finger, then studied its tip short-sightedly.

  ‘I’ll have to get one of my apprentices to look at this stuff; he’s got far keener sight than me.’

  Then, Matthew picked up the stocking, made of fine brown wool, and peered at the ragged edges of the holes made by the rats. He took a small wooden spatula from a pocket and scraped around inside the boot, then turned the hose inside out and scraped some of the slimy mess from the foot. William watched this with interest.

  ‘Is there something there?’ he asked.

  The apothecary grunted. ‘I’m not sure. There is so much slime from the sloughing of the dead man’s skin that it’s hard to tell. As I said, I’ll get my lad, Stephen, to go through it with his sharp eyes. Come back in the morning and I’ll tell you if I’ve found anything significant.’ With that, Hangfield had to be content, though he was not sure if the apothecary really was hoping to make some discovery or whether he was just humouring him.

  ‘Do you want to see the dead rats?’ he said hopefully. ‘In case there is anything you can tell from the way they died?’

  Matthew Herbert shook his head. ‘I don’t need dead rats, but I may have a need for some live ones,’ he said enigmatically.

  Given the coroner’s lack of enthusiasm for William’s latest theory, the officer did not report his visit to the apothecary and carried on with his normal work, chec
king on witnesses for an inquest next day on a boy who had been crushed by a collapsing wall in the city, a not infrequent accident, given the cramped building conditions and often the shoddy workmanship.

  That evening, he went home and again regaled his family with the day’s events. His small son, Nicholas, was fascinated by his account of the dead rats and chewed boots, asking for more details of each morbid episode from the hovel on Welsh Back. His mother was afraid that this might give him nightmares, but with the resilience of the young, Nicholas slept like a log all night.

  Early next day, his father escaped from the castle chapel as soon as possible and made his way down to the apothecary’s shop, hoping against hope that Matthew Herbert would have found something to bolster the conviction that the clothing had something to do with Giffard’s death. The apothecary left his desk and motioned him into the back room.

  ‘See those? Dead as mutton,’ he said, pointing at three dead rats on the floor.

  ‘But I didn’t leave them with you,’ said William, puzzled at the sight.

  Matthew shook his head. ‘No, they’re not your rats, they are ones my apprentices caught for me yesterday. I needed them for a test.’

  He explained that he had locked the three rodents in a large box, giving them some cheese and meat mixed with a substance he had scraped from the inside of the boots and soaked from the lower part of the hose.

  ‘It killed them overnight, with the same symptoms of twitching and fits that you saw in your hovel on the quayside!’

  Hangfield stared at the dead rats with fascination. ‘So what was it that killed them?’ he asked excitedly.

  ‘That was the hard part,’ said Matthew with satisfaction. ‘I thought I saw something in the slime in the boot when you were here yesterday, but my apprentice did much better and picked out a few of these.’

  He held out a small dish on which was a smear of brownish slime, embedded in which were a number of tiny yellowish spheres, each the size of a pin-head.

  ‘What the devil are they?’ demanded William, whose fairly good eyesight could just about see them.

  ‘You may well call upon the Devil, for these little things killed those rats – and maybe killed that poor beggar, as well as your physician,’ announced the apothecary firmly. ‘They are the seeds of the yew tree, and are extremely poisonous.’

  Hangfield felt a wave of exultation that his intuition had proved correct, though he soon tempered this with thought of the difficulties that still lay ahead, such as how was it done and by whom?

  ‘But how could seeds in hose and boots kill a man?’ he pleaded. ‘The death of the rats I understand – you gave it to them in food. That could not have happened to either the beggar or to Robert Giffard.’

  ‘The seeds did not kill them,’ Matthew replied. ‘It was the substance around them that conveyed the poison, though that was originally made from the seeds.’ He sat on the edge of a box in the storeroom. ‘Look, everyone knows – certainly all country folk – that the yew tree is very dangerous. Branches lopped from yew are never left on the ground, because if livestock eat them, they may well die. All parts of the yew contain this poison, except the pulp of the berries. Yet the tiny seeds in the centre of the berries is very poisonous indeed!’

  William still failed to see where this lecture was going. ‘So what killed the rats and the others?’

  The apothecary patiently continued his explanation. ‘I gave the rats some scrapings from inside the boots and on the hose – it was virtually a paste, but that was because the rotten skin of the beggar, together with dirt from his feet and sweat, had probably softened what I suspect was originally a dry powder made from pounding a large number of seeds extracted from yew berries.’

  William was still confused. ‘But how could that kill a man – in fact, two men, if you count the beggar?’

  ‘In my profession, we very often apply our medicaments through the skin – apart from giving cures by mouth, that is about the only other route available, other than by a clister through the back passage. Rubbed into the skin, especially with some kind of fatty base, some of the drug gets absorbed into the body.’

  William Hangfield frowned as he digested this information. ‘So someone would have to sprinkle the powdered yew seeds into the boots and hose undetected, if he – or she – wanted to cause harm to the victim?’

  Matthew nodded his agreement. ‘It would be a brownish colour and as the clothing was the same hue, it might well go unnoticed.’

  ‘Would this be effective in a single dose or would the effect only work over a long period?

  ‘I have seen two cases of yew poisoning in my lifetime, both in children who ate the attractive berries. Thankfully, both survived after forced vomiting and energetic purging, but they became very ill within a few hours, again with twitching and fits and a very irregular pulse. So a single large dose can kill quickly, but I doubt that could be achieved through the skin, so a more long-term application would be needed, which could build up to dangerous or fatal levels.’

  William had by now grasped all the essentials of the method of killing, but the vital question now remained – who was responsible? He had one last question for the apothecary.

  ‘The previous illness, which cleared up when he left the house for London – have you any idea what that might have been?’

  Matthew considered this for a moment.

  ‘It was certainly not the yew poison. He had an obvious excess of bile in his system and there are a number of poisons obtainable from plants in the hedgerows and woods that would do that. I would suggest it might have been an extract of ragwort, that tall yellow weed that grows everywhere. That sometimes kills horses and asses, even when they merely eat hay that contains the dried plant – but there is no way of being certain.’

  William thanked Matthew Herbert sincerely for his help and asked him to keep the evidence safe until he knew how the coroner wanted to proceed. It was about time he told Ralph fitz Urse that the investigation had been revived, so he trudged back to the castle with the news.

  As luck would have it – though possibly bad luck – he found the sheriff in the coroner’s chamber, sharing a jug of red Anjou wine as they chewed over the latest news of King Edward’s problems. It was not long since the humiliating defeat at the battle at Boroughbridge and though Bristol was a royal stronghold, the tide was turning against him, mainly from the Scots and his own barons, though even his wife was beginning to lose patience with her husband’s infatuation with the Despensers, both father and son.

  The two men were arguing about the prospects of war when William came in, and he had some difficulty in bringing them back to the problems of the immediate present.

  ‘I know how Robert Giffard was murdered, sirs,’ he announced as soon as he had managed to get their attention. ‘But I have no idea who did it!’

  Nicholas Cheyney stared at him as if he had suddenly lost his wits and the coroner glared at him ferociously.

  ‘What are you talking about?’ he barked. ‘We’ll never know what happened to Giffard. There’s nothing left to discover.’

  His officer tried to keep a smug expression from his face. ‘But I’ve just discovered it, sir. He had poison put in his boots and hose!’

  ‘In his boots!’ yelled the sheriff. ‘Are you quite mad, William Hangfield?’

  Hurriedly, the serjeant explained, before the others had apoplexy. He told them the whole story of the beggar, the dead rats and his involvement of Matthew the apothecary.

  ‘He says there’s no doubt about the yew being the poison, and though he has never heard of it being used through the skin, there is no medical reason why it shouldn’t work.’

  Eventually, the two senior men grudgingly accepted that the officer was neither mad nor playing some inexplicable practical joke.

  ‘We must hear this from Matthew Herbert’s own mouth,’ growled the coroner. ‘Then discover who the culprit must be.’

  ‘It has to be someone in the Giffard househol
d,’ snapped the sheriff. ‘No one else would have access to either his boots or, in the previous suspected poisoning, to his food.’

  ‘And it must be someone who knows a great deal about yew poison and how it could be absorbed through the skin,’ added William, sagely.

  ‘That servant who acts as an apothecary fits the bill best,’ grated the sheriff. ‘What was his name, Stogursey or some such?’

  ‘Remember that the lady Eleanor had the same access to his food and his boots,’ objected fitz Urse. ‘And there is this suspicion that she might be carrying on with Jordan fitz Hamon.’

  ‘But she would not have enough knowledge of poisons to pull off this yew-in-the-boots trick,’ scoffed Nicholas Cheyney, always ready to contradict the coroner.

  Again, William threw in a reasonable contribution. ‘The one who knew about the yew seeds and was able to prepare them need not be one who actually administered them, sirs.’

  The other two digested this for a moment. ‘If so, then even Jordan fitz Hamon could be behind the murderous plot!’ said the coroner.

  The sheriff, who was ultimately responsible for law and order in the county of Somerset, turned to William with new orders.

  ‘We need to shake the tree of the Giffard household and see what falls out. Take a couple of men-at-arms with you and get to the truth of this affair, even if you threaten them with torture.’

  Hangfield sincerely hoped it would not come to that, but he touched his forehead respectfully and left to carry out his orders.

  At the house in King Street, he sought an audience with Mistress Eleanor, brushing aside any delaying tactics by Edward Stogursey. She was in the doctor’s chamber with the new physician, a pleasant-looking man of about thirty, but William, invoking the command of the sheriff, asked her to step into an empty living-room nearby.

  ‘Madam, we have now discovered how your husband died – he was murdered by the poison from yew berries,’ he announced bluntly. ‘The deadly substance could only have been administered by someone in this household – and his previous illness in February may have been from putting a tincture made from ragwort in his food, again obviously by someone in the house.’