The Medieval Murderers - The Deadliest Sin

‘Oh, yes,’ she said, eying the room, ‘you are looking at me and all the while remembering Laurence’s description of me when I was a girl. Well, if I have changed a little, so has he. Thirty years ago, he was a… oh, well, never mind.’

The landlord of the Angel, now sitting in comfort as one of the audience, shrugged ruefully as faces turned towards him. He raised his bowl of wine in ironic salute. Whatever the small niggles between husband and wife, it was obvious that they understood each other well. Agnes Carter now took up the part of the storyteller.

There’s one thing that Laurence has not told you, which he did not know at the time. But I had it from my mother, Joan Rath. Thomas Flytte the physican was Joan’s cousin from the village of Woolney, and his companion, Reeve, was actually his son. My mother said this was common knowledge in the family but something never spoken of. If you looked closely you could see a likeness in their faces, around the eyes. Thomas had fathered the child before he left Woolney as a young man. It may have been his reason for leaving the village in a hurry, to avoid some forced betrothal. When he came back all those years later, by instinct he went first to the village to find that only his son was left. The child had grown to a man, but he was a shy and sullen one, who preferred to keep away from company. He was called Reeve because that was the surname of his mother – her father had been reeve of an estate near Woolney. The lad must have had a given name but, if so, his father never used it and simply referred to him as Reeve, as if to say: you don’t really belong to me but to that other person with a different name.

The father may not have wanted to acknowledge the son, but Reeve wasn’t to be so easily shaken off. He followed Thomas away from his birthplace and came with him to Wenham, where they were housed by my mother. The villagers assumed he was some sort of servant. Laurence says he trailed after the physician like a dog, and that there was something sinister or dangerous about him. I didn’t see that. To me, he was a rather pitiful creature. At first, anyway…

My mother also had a story about just why Thomas Flytte returned home after all those years of wandering. She believed what he said because she was truly grateful to him on account of his treatment of her daughter. As I am grateful to him, God rest his soul, for without him, I don’t believe I would be standing here in front of you. My mother and the physician exchanged confidences. He told his tales of travel and foreign courts. He showed her a brooch of yellow topaz. The image of a falcon was cut into it. He said that this was to attract the favour of kings. It was his most treasured possession.

Thomas told my mother that he had fallen foul of a powerful man in the court of Edward II. This courtier surrounded himself with a rabble of projectors and forecasters, some of them little better than vagabonds. Thomas Flytte was on the verge of a great discovery in the search for the substance that would transform base metal into gold, but before he could achieve this the courtier demanded the return of some money he had invested in the scheme. Thomas promised the man that if he was allowed to continue only a little longer he would be rewarded a hundred times over but the courtier was not to be persuaded. The physician had already spent the money, and his own besides, on the equipment he needed, so when the courtier began to threaten him with dreadful punishments and vengeance, Thomas had no choice but to return here to his birthplace in an obscure corner of the country. He was lying low, licking his wounds, deciding what to do next.

The landlady, Agnes Carter, paused in her narrative. Like her husband, but in a more genteel way, she sipped at a bowl of wine before returning to her story, and the moment when they’d discovered the physician’s corpse.

It was a strange talk we had, young Laurence and I. We did not raise our voices but conversed in loud whispers on either side of the crossing. I had a cooler head than he, I think, so I said that he should go back and raise the hue and cry. In fact he’d be punished if he didn’t do that since it was his duty and he was of age. Meantime, I’d return home and pretend that nothing had happened, if anyone noticed my absence and asked. Already I was good at adopting a guarded face – and keeping secrets. Despite what men say, women can keep counsel, you know.

Laurence took to his heels across the fields. But I did not return home straight away. I gazed at the body of the physician, or what I was able to see of it bundled across the stile. I did not mind being so close to the corpse. I almost felt that he should not be left alone, even though I knew I could not be discovered here when the people came. Then I started wondering what Thomas Flytte had been doing out here. Obviously, he was on his way somewhere, going from the little house where he lodged with Reeve to… where? Or perhaps, he had been coming in the opposite direction, from the Carters’ to the Raths’, and had met someone as he was crossing the stile. Or perhaps, some person had been lying in wait for him. I looked at the ground at the base of the stile but it was just tussocky grass. It was coming on to rain again. Close by was a clump of trees and I went there for cover, though the branches were still quite bare.

From where I was standing I had a good view of the protruding legs of the dead man. I looked down and saw something glinting on the ground. I picked it up. It was a tiny sheet of gold, or what looked like gold, set in a frame of wood. On the sheet was engraved the image of a lion. I’d never seen this object before but I recognised it all the same. It was one of the talismans that Master Thomas carried with him, and the sort of thing he bestowed on those he treated. I cast around on the ground under the trees but saw no more items. Had he dropped it? Had someone tried to steal it from him? Surely the little lion showed that the physician had been here under the trees. I could have dropped the talisman on the ground again, but instead I took it.

And now I examined the earth more closely, I saw the mark of boots or shoes pressed into the earth in a place where the grass grew more thinly and where the mud was still soft on account of the wet dripping down from the bare branches. The print of the shoes was deep as though the person standing here had continued for a long time without movement. I shivered. I crouched down and measured the length of the imprint against my outstretched hand. It was nearly twice the length of my hand. Then I stole off towards the corpse and the feet that stuck out on this side. Strangely I did not feel frightened or disrespectful but… merely curious. I placed my hand against the sole of the dead man’s shoe and realised that whoever it was that had left their mark under the trees it was not Thomas Flytte.

Then I thought I had done enough work for one day and I ran home, before Laurence should arrive back and the hue and cry begin. It was too late to do anything that evening and by the time the first villagers came out to examine the body, the light had almost faded from the sky. Anyway, nothing could be done until the coroner arrived. He attended the next morning. He had come from Thetford, as quick as carrion, eager to see what pickings he might get from the corpse in the way of deodands and fines. I remember his horse; it was a dapple grey hackney. He was accompanied by a servant.

In truth, that scene is clearer and sharper in my mind’s eye than anything that happened yesterday. Almost everybody in the village of Wenham, from priest to ploughman to hayward stood in the field close to the stile, the babies in their mothers’ arms, the children jostling to the front for a better view. It was a chill morning. The crows circled and the clouds pressed low overhead. But however grim the occasion, and however much sadness there was at the death of Thomas Flytte, you could sense excitement, too. Even the Carters and the Raths buried their differences for a time and exchanged a few words, though they did it warily, as if they understood that an unconsidered remark or a thoughtless move might bring trouble down on all their heads.