The Medieval Murderers - The Deadliest Sin

‘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him but now the hostility between the two families seemed to have… not died away, exactly… but the heat and anger had been replaced by a sort of cold sadness.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.