The Medieval Murderers - The Deadliest Sin

Thomas was trying to make sense of all this, to tie the threads between this rambling tale and the death of Eustace, but he could not make the connection.

‘Your sister was punished for being a whore?’

‘She wasn’t a whore,’ Meggy said fiercely. ‘She was faithful to him; never slept with no one else. She loved Father Robert. She loved him! But to him, she was only one of dozens of girls.’

Suddenly, Thomas understood. There’d been an incident just over a year before. An accusation that several of the young priests at the Cathedral were entertaining the town whores in their beds overnight. The accusation had been made anonymously but, as was always the way in Lincoln, soon the whole town was gossiping about it and the Cathedral officials had been forced to act. They’d raided several of the chambers of the priests and dragged out the girls they found there.

The girls had all been shorn and whipped and forced to do penance at the Cathedral door. Their duty having been seen to be done, things had then returned to normal, and presumably the whores had gone about their business once more.

As for the priests, a few light penances had been imposed, including, Thomas remembered, on the subdean’s nephew, who was one of those found in the arms of a girl, but no one was anxious to make much of the matter as far as the priests were concerned. They were all young men, prey to the temptations of the flesh, and celibacy was hard on the young. Who could really blame naïve boys, unused to women’s wiles, for being seduced by artful and professional prostitutes? Besides, there was scarcely a senior clergyman who didn’t recall, with a slight twinge of guilt, some similar failing in their own distant past, and for some it wasn’t that distant.

‘The body in the chapel,’ Thomas said softly, ‘that was your sister.’

‘I dug her up and carried her there in a cart. Thought if they was to find them together and not know who she was, they’d give her a proper burial in a consecrated ground, then the Devil couldn’t take her.’

‘You knew that Giles’s body was already there?’

‘Saw them take it there.’ Her face became contorted again. ‘I didn’t mean to kill him. It were an accident. I only meant to get them punished, like my poor sister had been punished. I wasn’t going to keep the cross, I swear I wasn’t. That’s why I was putting it back in Father Robert’s chamber. Thought they’d find it there and he’d be shamed in front of the world, like my poor sister was. But he came in, that Eustace. Accused me of being one of Robert’s whores. I told him I wasn’t. I swore to him she wasn’t neither. But he laughed. Said all women were whores and it were him who’d reported Robert and the others for fornicating. It was his fault my sister died. All his fault!’

‘So you hit him,’ Thomas said.

‘I’m not sorry. You’ll not make me repentant of that. I’m glad he’s dead. Glad I killed him, ’cause now he’ll be rotting in the ground like her.’

‘And Giles?’

‘Told you that were an accident,’ she said sullenly. ‘I heard them talking about taking summat from the Cathedral and how they were going to hide it. They never take notice of me when I serve them, as if I’m nothing but a dumb hound for them to snap their fingers at when they want something fetching. I saw my chance. I reckoned if I could take it from them afore they had time to return it, then I could put it in Father Robert’s house and tell someone it was there, just like they was told about the girls being in the priests’ houses. He’d get the blame. They all would. I wanted to see them punished.

‘I followed them and soon as I saw where they was headed I guessed where Robert had hidden it. We used that loose stone as a hiding place for our little treasures when we were bairns. I took the cross, afore they could find it, but I lost my way in the dark, ran right into Giles and when he bumped against me, he felt it under my cloak.

‘He tried to grab me and make me give it to him. I pulled out my knife. I only meant to drive him off, but he came towards me again. He must have tripped over a root or some such in the dark, ’cause he fell forward onto the knife in my hand and the next thing I knew he was dead. I ran and hid; saw them carrying the body to the chapel and knew they weren’t going to report it. They couldn’t, not without giving themselves away.’

‘How did you get into the chapel? The door was locked.’

Meggy gave Thomas a pitying look. ‘Door on the other side, small one. Wood was so rotten it was easy to chip a hole in it and put my hand through. Key was in the lock on the other side. Stuffed up the hole up again with a bit of wood and leaves. Who’s to see in the dark?’

She looked up at him from under the mob of russet hair. Her expression was almost calm now.

‘They’ll not be punished, will they, those priests? None of them. They’ll punish me, though. They’ll hang me. But not them, never them, though they took my sister’s life no different than if they’d strangled her with their own hands.’

‘Your sister took her own life,’ Thomas said sternly. ‘The three men have been on a diet of bread and water and slept on straw these past nights, and there will be other penances imposed on them when all this is reported.’

She gave a mirthless laugh. ‘There’s many a bairn in England who’d be glad of a bite of bread for their suppers and a heap of straw to sleep on and think it heaven. What are they doing penance for? What’s their sin? I’d like to see every last priest in England struck down. That’s what God wants to do: strike them down like the angel of death slew all the first born of Egypt.’

Without warning, she lunged for the knife and grabbed it. Thomas threw up his arms to protect his face and chest, thinking she was going to plunge it into him, but instead, he heard a scream of agony. Meggy was sitting on the bench, her eyes wide in pain, her fingers still grasping the hilt of the knife that she had plunged into her own chest. A crimson stain was spreading rapidly out over the front of her gown, like a rosebud opening. Then she crumpled forward, her head thudding on the table, her hair tumbling over her face and covering those dead eyes.

There was a silence in the inn as Randal finished his tale. He was staring at rushes on the floor. ‘I think,’ he added softly, ‘the days are coming when Meggy will get her wish. If the pestilence reaches our shores, priests will be struck down in their thousands, as they have already been beyond these seas. Perhaps God has finally woken from His slumbers at last and the punishment we priests deserve is about to fall upon us all.’

Prior Wynter snorted. ‘According to your tale it is the women who deserve punishment – luring a priest from his scared vows, desecrating a sacred and holy object by using it to murder a man of God, not to mention the wickedness of suicide. It seems to me you have shown us that lust was the chief sin in this fable and it was lust that was justly punished with the death and damnation of these two wanton females.’

All the women in the tavern bridled and there was an explosion of protests.

‘And I suppose the clerics received no punishment at all, just like poor Meggy predicted,’ Katie said indignantly, glowering at Prior Wynter, ‘in spite of the fact that they’d stolen and lied.’

‘There were penances,’ Randal said dully, staring at his hands. ‘The subdean decided his nephew was too much of a liability to keep him at the Cathedral. So he found Robert a parish on the edge of the fens far from the inns and stews of Lincoln. And he sent a comely housekeeper to cook and clean for him, knowing that even if the housekeeper found more ways than a heated stone to warm his nephew’s bed, at least the rumours would never reach as far as Lincoln.