The Medieval Murderers - The Deadliest Sin

Eventually, William Carter convinces himself that what he fears and suspects is so, and he decides to act. He knows that the most out-of-the-way path between their two properties is across the overgrown stile. After witnessing the couple meeting in Church Lane that morning, he determines to keep watch near the stile. Were they arguing about boundaries – or were they having a lovers’ quarrel? He listens to his wife, Alice, talk about inspecting the hedges and fences and the request from Alfred to meet there. She won’t go, of course. Or will she?

He walks out in the afternoon and reaches the boundary between his land – his wife’s land! – and he slips over the stile because he wants to catch Alfred Rath all unawares. He shelters under the spinney. While he waits, the rain pours down and the anger boils up within him until it can no longer be contained. When he glimpses a figure he thinks it is Alfred Rath, because of the man’s size and because of the clothes he is wearing. The man under the trees fumbles for the piece of rope he has carried for just this moment – what better way to dispose of an enemy than with an item like the one he taunted you with? – and as he does this he lets fall the talisman which the physician had given him as a preventative against the stone and choler and other hot conditions. He runs out of his hiding-place and overpowers Alfred as he stands for an instant before the stile. Except that the man is not Alfred Rath but Thomas Flytte, who has been lent a mantle by Alfred. In the madness of his attack, William does not realise this. Perhaps he does not see what he’s done until he has choked the doctor and thrown his body head-first across the stile. Perhaps it is not until later that he realises with horror that he has killed the wrong man.

Luckily for him, there are other possible culprits to hand, like the pedlar Hugh Tanner and the servant Reeve. Both are missing and either of them might have murdered Thomas Flytte. Yet William Carter has not got away with it. He suffers in silence, or an even greater silence than usual. His wife is perhaps uneasily aware of her part in all of this, as is Alfred Rath. That is what her father means when he says to Agnes, ‘I should not have done it.’ He is not talking about the rope and the alehouse but about his… link with Alice Carter. Unhappiness has descended on both families. Joan too pays a penalty even though she has done nothing, and it may be the reason she slowly fades from our sight.

So when William sees Reeve emerging out of the sun and mist that morning, it was as if he’d been expecting him. How else to explain the way he stayed fixed to the spot or to understand those strange words he uttered: ‘You are come, then’? He did not try to run away or to avoid the blow. It was the punishment he felt he deserved, even if he might not have known it was coming at the hands of the physician’s son. And there we have Reeve’s motive, too. He wasn’t a demon or a man possessed by one. He must have witnessed his father’s murder or appeared in the aftermath of the scene. He alone knew who was responsible, and that it was William Carter. Reeve took refuge in the Great Wood where he went mad in his own fashion until that morning when he appeared clad in rags and armed with a knife to take his vengeance. He was angry. But not as angry as William Carter when he brooded over the wrongs done to him by his neighbour. In the end, his rage blinded him and he killed an innocent man, an act that led to the deaths of others as well as himself.

‘So you see, ladies and gentlemen,’ concluded the landlord of the Angel, ‘why it is that I say anger is the worst of the seven sins. Like the other sins, it blinds us to our faults and even causes us to believe we are acting rightfully. Then it takes us further, urging us to pick up the nearest implement and to turn our rage into deeds. The injury we do ourselves is made many times worse by the injury we do to others.’

‘And here,’ said the landlady of the Angel, ‘is a token of our story.’

From the depths of her dark red gown, Agnes Carter produced a small object. She lifted and turned it so that it glittered gold in the candlelight. She held it out to the nearest pilgrim.

‘Go on, please,’ she said. ‘Touch the talisman and pass it round. Observe the image of the lion. It is good for the stone and for those of a choleric disposition. A cunning-woman held that thing and it told her a story. Perhaps it will tell one of you another story, a different one.’

The storytelling was now taken up by an individual called Nicholas Hangfield. It was he who had attempted to speak to Janyn Hussett, the veteran of Crécy, at the very beginning. He was a quiet, good-natured fellow in his thirties, stocky and with dark hair. He explained that he’d been born in Bristol but that he’d moved to London, where he worked as a shipping clerk. He liked being near the water and he liked the sight of boats, though you’d never have caught him actually boarding one. Bristol was one of the places in the west where the plague was supposed to have struck and people looked expectantly at Nicholas as though he might have news for them, but he said that he had no family living there now and thus was no better informed than any of them.

‘My father, William, God rest his soul, told me this tale many times, especially when I was a child – and when he was bed-fast for months, dying of a creeping inflammation of his lungs.

‘In his prime, he had been one of the serjeants of the Sheriff of Somerset, living in Bristol where I was born and brought up. Not yet thirty years ago, in the fifteenth year of the reign of the second Edward, he had been assigned by the sheriff to be an officer to the county coroner and he served him for a considerable time. My father came to know about all the violent, unusual and suspicious deaths in the city and regaled me with many remarkable tales. One story in particular intrigued me and every detail has stuck in my memory – so much so that in many idle moments, I contrived my own conception of the affair, seeing the people in my mind’s eye and hearing their voices in my imagination, until I built up a kind of play or masque in my head that was as good as reality. My theme is…

Envy

One sunny afternoon in late spring, Robert Giffard was lying on a bench in the garden behind his burgage in High Street, listlessly watching his servant place a goblet on a stool alongside him. It contained no fine wine, but a sour concoction that he himself had ordered the man to make up in his dispensary at the front of the house.

‘Had we enough mother-wort in stock, Edward? We were running low.’ Robert’s voice was weak as he reached for the glass, but Edward Stogursey nodded reassuringly.

‘Enough for another dozen potions, sir. And plenty of valerian, too.’

He was the physician’s house steward and personal servant, but also acted as his lay assistant in the practice. A stocky man with a square face and cropped brown hair, he had an impassive manner that rarely showed any emotion. As far as he knew himself, he was about thirty years old, but as he had been left as a foundling in the porch of Stogursey Priory, he had no knowledge of the date of his birth. A local widow had taken him in and given him the name of their village in the Quantock Hills, adding the royal Edward for good measure.

As he walked back to the house, he stood aside deferentially as his master’s wife hurried out of the door and made for where her husband lay in the sunny part of the long, narrow garden.

‘Robert, are you sure this is safe to drink?’ she asked anxiously, as she picked up the glass and sniffed at it suspiciously. Eleanor Giffard was a tall, slender woman, a decade younger than her husband’s forty years. Glossy black hair peeped from beneath a linen coif, framing a smooth, oval face that had a hint of Latin ancestry.