The Medieval Murderers - The Deadliest Sin

It was only when the figure was very close indeed that I saw with horror that it was Reeve, the servant of Thomas Flytte. Reeve, the bastard son who’d disappeared at around the time of the physician’s murder and who was reckoned by quite a few in the village to be responsible for it. I didn’t recognise him for several reasons. I never expected to see him again, and certainly not emerging from the mists of a fine autumn morning. And whatever it was he’d been doing in the months since his father’s death, wherever he’d been hiding himself away, none of it had been to his benefit. He’d always been as thin as one of the fence palings that my father was grasping with both hands. Now I could see his ribs, the bones in his arms, his head like a ball on a stick. He was wearing almost nothing. Rags around his feet, a cloth knotted about his middle, some leaves woven in his hair. Worst of all though was that his bare, famished body was painted in streaks and tongues of red. It was this and his strange, jumping progress that made me think he was wreathed in flames. I have never seen anything like it except for many years afterwards watching a play in Norwich. One of the devils on the stage had just the look of Reeve and I could not stay in the market square but had to leave off watching.

The red paint on Reeve’s tattered body was blood. Beside me I heard Ralf gasp and some sound came from the back of my throat. Still my father did not move or even flinch. He did not run back to the house where my mother, Alice, was with two small children, a brother and sister to me. For all I knew, there were others inside. I would have shouted out a warning but I could not get my tongue to work. Reeve halted a few feet in front of William. He stood there unnaturally still after all his jerky moving and he stared at my father, who said something. I could not pick up the words clearly because his back was to me and he was speaking low, but they sounded like, ‘It is come, then’ or, ‘You are come, then.’

After that, there was a silence that seemed to last for many minutes but must have been only a few seconds. The silence was broken by a scream. It came from somewhere out of sight but I knew it was my mother at the door of the farmhouse, gazing at her husband and the blood-stained man. William glanced sideways in the direction of the scream and after that things happened very quickly.

From under the cloth about his middle, Reeve produced a knife. Its blade flashed in the sun. He stepped forward and, using both hands, raised it high in the air and brought it down in the centre of my father’s chest. I heard the thud of the blow and a great gasp from my father as the air was pushed out of him and he staggered backwards. He fell next to a rosemary bush in the herb garden. The dagger stuck out of his chest. His legs and arms were flailing in the dark green of the rosemary. Another scream came from my mother, and that broke the spell that had kept Ralf and me crouching at the hayloft opening. We turned and scrambled down the ladder, through the barn and out into the open air. By now, Reeve had turned and was running away from what he had done. I heard a chink of something striking the ground and saw that Ralf had thrown a chisel but it landed far short of the fleeing man. Reeve ran along the same path as the one he’d come on. He did not shift around or pause for a jig this time but ran for his life until he was lost in the haze of the morning.

Meantime, my mother had reached my father’s body and I stood beside her, confused and uncertain what to do. She was wringing her hands and moaning. William was still alive but there was a bubbling sound emerging from his slack mouth and the blood was welling up around the dagger, which had gone in almost to the hilt. It quivered with his dying breaths. His tunic was already soaked. I rushed inside to get something to stanch the flow, telling my little brother and sister that they were on no account to come outside. But by the time I returned to the herb-bed with some rags clutched in my hand, it was all over. My mother was kneeling beside William, one bloody hand spread over his chest and the other stroking his forehead.

Ralf the carpenter had set off in pursuit of Reeve but the mad man was far too quick for him and he gave up within a few minutes and returned to the farmhouse together with a couple of men from the fields. He had retrieved his chisel and now he was wielding it like a dagger. Very soon others arrived, drawn by my mother’s cries or by the sense that something was wrong. In a stumbling way, Ralf and I told them what had happened and told it again and the numbers of men around the palings of the herb garden grew until we had a large enough band to go in pursuit of Reeve. There were women too by now, consoling Alice and tending to the corpse even though it could not be moved until the Thetford coroner arrived. Among us was Alfred Rath, Agnes’s father. He talked quietly to my mother, and his words sounded soothing though I’m not sure she was listening. I thought it showed Christian charity in him that he should be here so quickly to help at the house of an old enemy.

Alfred thought more clearly than any of us. He said that from our description of Reeve and his naked state he could not have been living anywhere close to the village, otherwise he would surely have been seen before now. True, he might have been hiding out in one of the tumbledown buildings dotted around Wenham, but most of them were used for storage or plundered for their wood and stone, and so wouldn’t have provided a safe lair. The obvious hiding-place – the only place – was the Great Wood. And that was the direction he’d run towards. Alfred took charge and issued commands. He strode across to the barn where Ralf had been doing his repairs and directed us to pick up whatever implements we could for the hue and cry. Ralf was quick to protect his tools in the hayloft but he did present me with his chisel, telling me to keep it safe. He equipped himself with a stave.

By now there were at least three dozen men and boys gathered together, and all of us eager to give chase. I was so distracted by the hurry and excitement that I had almost no time to think of the death of the man who was my step-father. Later, I grieved, though not for long. Now we set off across the fields, half striding, half running. Almost everybody was clutching a weapon of some sort: staves, clubs, pitchforks, knives. From what we’d seen, Ralf and I, it did not seem as though Reeve could still be armed. He’d left his dagger planted in William Carter’s chest, and his clothing was so tattered that there was no place for anything else. Yet, even if unarmed, he was still very dangerous: he was an outcast and a murderer, a man almost naked, painted with blood, and possessed by spirits.

The sun had burned off the mist and we were sweating by the time we reached the boundary of the Great Wood, where Agnes and I had visited Mistress Travis the day before. She lived in a different part, opposite to the Raths’ farm, where it was less densely wooded and there were more paths. Even so, I worried for her in the woods with Reeve on the loose, and I wondered at this because yesterday I had been afraid of her and her visions. Now, Alfred Rath halted us on the edge of the trees and split us up into four groups, directing one to go left and one to the right and search inside the boundary, while the other two were to penetrate deeper into the trees, one veering to the east, the other west. He told us to stay tight within our own group and to judge our direction as best we could by the glimpses of the sun. Though the trees were bare, they were clustered together in many places, making it hard to see far.

I was with Ralf and, by chance, we were part of the band that was heading north-east, though any idea of direction stopped meaning much when we were crashing through the undergrowth and fanning out to cover as much ground as possible. We whooped and we shouted and some banged their staves against the tree trunks, as if we were trying to flush out the quarry from his hiding-place through the sheer din of the thing. Yet for all the noise and the company, Ralf and I found ourselves somehow separated from the others.