The Medieval Murderers - The Deadliest Sin

We followed a narrow path that was piled thick and slippery with yellow leaves until we were brought up short by a pool of blackish water. Only when we stopped to look for the best way round it did we realise that we were alone. In the distance we could hear the whoops and cries of the others. Then the noises died away and we heard nothing apart from the creaking branches and some rustling in the undergrowth. It was as if there had never been anyone in the Great Wood but Ralf and me – and Reeve, most likely. I felt my scalp prickling and my hand tightened round the chisel, which I still held. Ralf prodded at the black pool with his stave and it bubbled and gave off a terrible stench. He looked at me from under his heavy brows and I saw that he was as frightened as I was. For all the thickness of the trees there was some light on the floor of the forest on account of the fine morning. Abruptly, it grew dark. It was only the sun going behind a cloud but the sudden gloom added to my fear. I looked up and I must have gasped or cried out for I was conscious of Ralf staring at me in horror before he too turned his head upwards.

Immediately above us dangled an object that I couldn’t make out. Then I saw that it was a pair of naked feet, all clenched and curled up in agony like the feet of our saviour on the cross. Ralf and I staggered back and away from the pool of black water. Once the first shock had subsided, we were able to see more clearly. Hanging from a branch far above us was the body of the man called Reeve. He was absolutely naked now, though he was all scrawled over with the streaks of dried blood. I could scarcely see his face, he hung so far above us, but it lolled down as if he was regarding us from his great height and with his tongue stuck out.

We ran a few yards down the path and shouted. I don’t know what we said. I was very glad when some of the others came in answer to our cries, and most glad of all to see Alfred Rath. My companion, Ralf, pointed with his arm stiff and outstretched and then it seemed as though every man and boy in Wenham was crowding through the trees and down the path and teetering on the edge of the black pool and shoving each other aside so as to get a better view of the hanged man.

After that there was no real part for me to play. All work in the fields and in the village stopped with the double deaths and the arrival of the Thetford coroner. My father’s body was removed from the herb garden and laid out in our house, with Master John in attendance. Some time later during the day Reeve’s body was cut down. It was Ralf who offered to climb the tree. I think he felt that as he, with me, had been the first to glimpse the body he should be the one to retrieve it. He used the ladder from our hayloft. I helped him carry it across the fields and into the Great Wood. He climbed up the dead man’s tree and crawled along the stout branch, and with a knife cut through the knots holding up the body. Reeve had hanged himself with the lengths of rag he wore about his middle or wrapped around his feet. Once Ralf severed the ragged noose, the body plunged down and landed half in the pool of black water. Several people who’d been standing too close were spattered with the stinking mud, to the amusement of the rest of us.

Although everybody treated that day as a kind of grim holiday, running between houses and standing gossiping on corners, the alehouse did good business. There was more talk about Reeve than about my father. People shuddered and looked over their shoulders and crossed themselves and said the murderer could not be human, but a monster or a devil in human shape. They said he must have been living wild in the Great Wood – which was surely true – catching and killing small animals to eat raw and besmearing himself with their blood and his own, for he had many cuts and wounds across his body. I remembered the time I’d seen him emerging from the shadows, holding a dead rabbit and giving his little smile.

It was Reeve, of course, who had killed Thomas Flytte in the springtime, choking the life out of the physician and leaving his body draped over the stile between the Carters’ land and the Raths’. Although almost no one was aware that he was more than a servant or companion to the physician but instead Thomas’s bastard son, everyone remembered the way he’d trailed after his master like a sullen dog. Everyone remembered his silent stare. As to why he had stabbed my stepfather, that was no mystery at all. If Reeve was a devil, then this was what devils did. If he was human, which was doubtful, then he must be mad or possessed, and it was well known that such individuals behaved in ways that were completely beyond reason or explanation. It was a mercy that he had hanged himself and saved the gallows an extra burden.

William Carter was buried in proper fashion in the churchyard, with all due ceremony. Master John reminded us that life was short and fragile – as if we needed reminding! My mother paid for Mass to be said daily for my father. I do not know what happened to Reeve’s corpse. Somebody suggested it should be left where it had fallen by the black pond, which was dark and stinky enough to be one of the mouths of hell. But this was not enough for those men in the village who wanted to dispose of it so that it could never return to trouble us. They dumped the body in the back of a cart and took it off somewhere distant from Wenham, as if to remove the taint altogether from the village. They were gone for more than a day and when they returned not a one of them would say what they’d done with it. Perhaps they burned the corpse. Perhaps they buried it at a crossroads after driving a stake through the heart.

No one asked Ralf or me what we’d witnessed from the hayloft, beyond requiring the bare details from us, which we repeated again and again. The figure with the sun behind him, the body streaked with blood, the flashing knife. I didn’t tell anyone of the words that I thought my father had uttered as he faced Reeve – ‘It is come, then’ or, ‘You are come, then’ – for the words made no sense. No more sense than the way my father stood there without moving while Reeve came closer. He didn’t try to defend himself, he didn’t rush inside and bar the door. Normally, my father was prickly and quick to take offence. He was a choleric man. But on this final occasion he had stayed to be slaughtered like a tethered beast.

My mother’s grief at my father’s death did not last so long. By the next summer, she had married, for the third time. Her husband was – Alfred Rath. For Joan had died before the Christmas of that year. So the two families that had been at odds for so long were joined together, after a fashion. Agnes and I became like cousins, true cousins, and no one cared now what we did or how much time we spent together.

A lot has happened in the intervening years, other deaths and births as well. All our parents are dead now, and the land that we farmed is held by our brothers, while Agnes and I are settled here at the Angel. We’ve often thought about what occurred during that summer and together we have pieced together a kind of story.

‘The story is like this,’ said Agnes, speaking from the back of the room, so the listeners once more had to crane their heads. ‘It might even be true. The individual waiting under the spinney by the stile was William Carter, the stepfather to Laurence. William hated Alfred Rath, on account of their long-lasting quarrels and differences, and especially because of the business of the rope in the alehouse. But above all he hated his neighbour because he suspected something was afoot between his wife, Alice, and Alfred. He could not keep watch on her all the time, he had too much to attend to, but his suspicions grew stronger all the time.’

Agnes Carter stopped and now her husband began to speak. From now on each spoke a few sentences as if they were sharing the tale, as if they really had created it together. Sometimes the Walsingham pilgrims weren’t even sure which one was speaking, man or wife.