The Medieval Murderers - The Deadliest Sin

He was a fellow with hangdog eyes and a skin as leathery as if he’d been tanned himself. His sales patter hardly deserved the name and yet somehow he managed to make a living from travelling through towns and villages like Wenham. He brought news from other places, which was always welcome, and sometimes he even talked of London. Like the cunning-woman, he was supposed to have the gift, to be able to see things that ordinary people couldn’t see. But it was a gift he was reluctant to use, as if whatever he saw was nothing good.

I myself was a witness to the first encounter of Hugh Tanner and Thomas Flytte. Except that it wasn’t their first encounter. It was market day again but this time on a spring morning, and people’s spirits were light. Hugh Tanner couldn’t afford a stall but he settled himself down with his scrip on a little mound at the edge of the village because he judged the flow of people would be best there. It was where a couple of paths from other hamlets came together, and so old Hugh was aiming to catch people before they reached the stalls and spent what little they had. He wasn’t a complete fool, was Hugh.

I was there at the edge of the village, with Agnes Rath, as it happens. We were friends, and a bit more besides, but we had to be careful, very careful, over our friendship. I’d prayed for her recovery when she was sick, and despaired with everyone else when she looked to be dying, and then rejoiced when the skill of Thomas Flytte saved her. I looked up to the physician for what he’d done and I tried to engage him in conversation. I went up to him in the street, and welcomed him to our village, which was a bit forward of me. He could have cuffed me for speaking out of turn or simply walked by. But he seemed amused. He stopped walking and started talking, not once but on two or three occasions, and that’s how I found out why gold is good for the heart and about those remedies that are made up of precious stones. He was patient with answering my questions, which is more than my mother or father were. From them, or at least from my father, I got blows or silence, mostly. It was Thomas Flytte who predicted I’d make a good tavern-host. He said, you’ve got to like people and to be unafraid of talking to them and curious about their lives, while knowing when it’s time to rein in your curiosity. You’ve also got to have a business head on your shoulders. Of course, all this went over my own head, business or otherwise, when I was twelve, but years later I remembered it and now you see me, and my dear wife, settled here at the Angel.

Agnes and I were by the village wash-house. This was a tank fed by a spring and covered with a pillared roof but otherwise open to the weather. There was a bit of privacy on the far side of it, and we were lying on the grass enjoying the April morning and feeling the season coursing through our veins. For once it wasn’t raining. The wash-house was a good spot to be on market day because none of the village women would be doing their laundry, and when the two of us met we had to meet in secret. We were out of sight of Hugh Tanner and the people passing along the road but could see them by peeking over the stone edge of the tank.

Suddenly, we were aware of insistent voices, overlapping with each other. We peered across the tank. The pedlar and Thomas Flytte were in the middle of an argument. They were talking too low for us to catch even the occasional word but I could hear the anger in both men’s tones, like water boiling in a pot. This was surprising because the physician was not only a grave and learned man but also a calm one, while Tanner was not one of those pedlars who shout their wares at the top of their voices but just the opposite. Something about the way the two men were standing quite close together on top of the little mound of grass, and the hissing tones of their speech, showed that they’d met before. In fact, they must have done, because Hugh Tanner had come back to the village that very morning, his first visit for several months, while Thomas Flytte had been there only a few weeks.

Within a few moments, Flytte strode away, and Tanner flung some words after him. They might have been ‘Fraud yourself!’ but I couldn’t say for certain. Then out of the woods came Reeve, the physician’s companion. He rarely walked beside Thomas Flytte or even close to him, but was usually trailing at a distance, like a dog following his master while being distracted by other, more interesting concerns. Reeve’s presence made you feel uneasy but it also cast a shadow of doubt over the physician. You asked yourself what he was doing with a man like that for a servant.

As he passed Hugh Tanner, Reeve gave him a glance, which the pedlar was unable to return. Fortunately, a couple of market-day visitors appeared and Hugh gladly unpacked his scrip and spread out the bits of rag and bone that even he scarcely pretended were the property of the saints. Meanwhile, Agnes and I slunk off from our trysting-place behind the wash-house without being observed and went our separate ways, arranging to meet later. We couldn’t afford to be seen together in the village.

What was the reason the two of us couldn’t be seen together? Surely, you must have guessed it by now, ladies and gentlemen – such a quick-thinking gathering of guests and pilgrims as this is? As you know, Agnes was from the Rath family, the oldest of several children. And I… I was one of the Carters, the eldest son of Alice and a stepson to William. He was my mother’s second husband. I cannot remember my own father, though I do know that he was called Todd. It was from Todd that my mother had gained the farm, which she was allowed to keep as a tenant because she worked hard and, better still, she was able to make others work harder. Then she married William Carter, when I was small. From the time I can remember anything at all, it was William who was telling me to sop up the last spot of grease from the soup bowl or sending me out at night in the rain to ensure the barn doors were properly fastened. By the time I found out that my mother’s husband wasn’t my father, I’d learned to think of him – and fear him – as a father. So that’s how he remained to me.

Well, if my father had caught me in company with Agnes, he’d have beaten me within an inch of my life. And Agnes, too, would have suffered at the hands of her parents. The hatred and suspicion between the heads of these two families extended to every person in them, or was supposed to. I had an example of that a few moments after I parted from Agnes. I glimpsed my mother, Alice, talking with Alfred Rath on Church Lane. It seemed as though they were having an argument for her face was growing red as it did when she was angry and she was gesturing with her hands. Alfred was raising his own hands in an appeasing way but it made no difference and she turned on her heel and came striding towards me. I looked round for a way of escape and saw my father William coming in the opposite direction. Luckily, I was by the lich-gate to the churchyard and so I slipped through there and crouched behind the churchyard wall. Neither my mother nor my father was aware of my presence.

‘What were you doing with that man?’ I heard him say. His voice had gone very quiet, in a way I’d learned to fear.

‘The insolence of that Rath,’ my mother said. She didn’t sound daunted but indignant. ‘He says I need to attend to our boundaries. He says the hedges are overgrown and the fences broken. He is demanding I go and inspect them with him this very afternoon.’

‘You’ll not go, of course.’

‘What do you take me for?’ said my mother.

My father grunted in reply, and I thought that he didn’t like being reminded of the fact that it was my mother who had taken over the farm from her first husband, and the related fact that people usually went to her first with any complaint or request. Probably my father thought he ought to be the one dealing with any question about the boundaries. Except, of course, Alfred Rath wouldn’t have approached him any more than William Carter would have approached Alfred Rath.