The Medieval Murderers - House of Shadows

The man slipped along behind the raised path, which ran parallel to the workers’ dwellings. He was not completely concealed from anyone working on the garden patches, but fortunately no one was about at the tail end of the afternoon. This was the second time in a single day that he had made a foray outside the priory and to the same house. On the first occasion he had waited until the woman and the lad had left the place. They were going fishing, the boy carrying a net. That meant they would be gone for some time.

The man waited until they were no more than tiny figures on the foreshore before he crept through the back entrance to the house. Inside, the air was fusty and sickly. Simon Morton was lying on the bed, scarcely breathing, it seemed. For an instant the man debated leaving nature to take its course. But, no, that was too risky. Giving himself no time for further thought, he heaved the bolster from where it lay by the sick man’s side and pressed it down over Morton’s face. The body under the blanket twitched and there was a sound somewhere between a groan and a gurgle, and then nothing more. But the man kept his hands firmly in place until there could be no chance of Morton ever waking up again. Then he retreated by the route he had come, forgetting in his haste to remove the bolster from the dead man’s face. He strode back in the direction of the priory, heart beating hard and breath coming short, but curiously satisfied. Duty done, and for the second time.

He had already overseen the death of Adam, the man with the crooked hand whom he had hired to dispose of John Morton. He had met Adam in the monks’ graveyard. It had been comparatively simple to catch Adam off guard, to slip the girdle over his head and pull it tight and tighter yet. An unholy glee filled him during the act. His legs were shaking as Adam’s slack body fell to the ground. Then he had hurriedly set the scene to make it appear as though Adam had killed himself.

The man would not have believed that he could have found the strength to kill another human being and then arrange his body just so. Yet in an hour of crisis strength comes from somewhere. Had the prior not said that men in despair can accomplish great and terrible things? It was a gift from above…or the other place. The man dismissed the thought. He had done his duty, that was all. When this was finished he would get absolution, he would cleanse himself.

With the deaths of John Morton, then Adam and now Simon, all those who knew the story of the cross were dead. All, that is, apart from the very few Cluniac brothers who were privy to the secret. And they would not talk.

When the man had heard the story, the supposed true story, of the origins of the cross, he had been outraged. It was as if a segment of the sky had fallen to earth. At all costs, the cross must be defended and the story of its origins suppressed. Those who had uncovered the secret must be silenced. The priory was in mortal danger and all measures were justified. Even God himself would wink at the act. Unwilling at first to do the necessary work himself, the man had approached Adam, recognizing his desperate and bitter character. He had envisaged a silent act, a killing conducted with decorum. But Adam had disposed of John Morton in the crudest and most public manner. Therefore it was necessary to deal with Adam. Once the man had surprised himself by finding the deed easy enough, the killing of Simon Morton followed naturally.

And with that the man thought it might be over. Absolution alone remained. Cleansing.

But then he turned to puzzling over how it was that two simple masons had understood the words of a Latin document uncovered in a vault. Too late, he recalled the gossip, familiar enough in the priory, that Mistress Morton was the bastard child of a priest. Too late, he considered that having such a man for a father – a wicked man who had defaulted on his duty – might mean that it was the woman who was at the root of all this trouble. Women were at the root of the world’s ills, beginning with Eve. And now there was this one, the offspring of a priest. Susanna Morton, well named after the woman in the Book of Daniel whose beauty had tempted the elders into gazing on her naked, bathing body. Susanna might have unpicked the secrets of Brother James’s testament. No sooner had the thought occurred to the man than it hardened into a certainty. It was Mistress Morton who was responsible. She had read what she shouldn’t have read. She, too, would have to be dealt with. Even as he strode along, the man fingered his girdle, which he would use around the woman’s white throat. Something in him relished the close quarters he would have to engage in to dispose of Susanna.

So now the man crossed over the path at the point behind the Morton house. It was fortunate, he told himself again, that the place was set a little apart from the other dwellings. But what was this? Far from the quiet of the afternoon, there was a throng of people around the Morton hut. Neighbours and even a couple of monks. Her foolish son was there too. Too late, the man recalled that Mistress Morton would have returned to find her husband dead. He almost giggled to think how fast he had forgotten that earlier murder. These people had come to condole with her. He could do nothing to her at present. He’d have to wait for a later opportunity.

He made to turn round and came face to face with Geoffrey Chaucer.

‘Brother Ralph,’ said Geoffrey.

Chaucer just about managed to pant the words out. He was red-faced and running with sweat.

The young man paused indecisively. Guilt and rage were written across his usually placid face like the mark of Cain.

‘What are you doing?’ said Geoffrey.

The monk seemed to consider the question before saying: ‘I am doing my duty. What are you doing?’

‘You were in on the secret, weren’t you?’ said Geoffrey after a time. ‘The true secret of the Bermondsey cross.’

‘I heard about it from Brother Peter. He was deeply troubled.’

‘But not as deeply as you,’ said Geoffrey, reflecting on how he’d recently thought of himself as a good judge of men. But there really was no way to winkle out a man’s inner self from his appearance. Here was Brother Ralph, innocent and bland-seeming but with the fire and fury of a fanatic. He already knew the answer, but for form’s sake he said: ‘Why did you carry out the killings?’

‘I have already told you. Duty. To defend the cross and the priory.’

‘They do not need defence of the kind you have given.’

‘I should have left you shut up in that vault. The chances were that you wouldn’t have been found for several days. Nobody goes down there. It is a cursed place.’

‘Why did you let me out?’

‘Not you, Master Chaucer. It was Magnus the cat. I knew I must have left him shut inside. He should not be shut in to starve.’

Geoffrey did not know whether to laugh or weep in the face of this murderous man who had already done two others to death and was undoubtedly on his way to kill a woman but who could still care about the life of a cat. He was about to call out to the cluster of individuals around Mistress Morton’s hut for assistance in apprehending Brother Ralph. But the monk anticipated him and took to his heels, running not in the direction of the low houses nor back towards the priory but eastwards towards the river. As he went he shouted out something about ‘cleansing waters’.

Chaucer set off in pursuit, but Ralph was younger, fitter and faster. He reached the edge of the shore. The mud was thick here, and he waded across it with difficulty, sploshing through the incoming tide. Geoffrey stumbled and fell on his face. Above him he heard the beating of wings and a shadow passed across. He glanced up but the bird, which he couldn’t identify, was already flying higher. He watched as Brother Ralph reached the end of his glutinous passage across the mud and stones and then, deliberately, waded into the fast-flowing water. His black garb billowed out, then only his head and a single arm were visible. The man’s white hand was the last of him that Geoffrey saw, a white and delicate hand.