The Deadliest Sin

The Fifth Sin

Laurence, the innkeeper of the Angel, gazed around with satisfaction. To a man and woman, the Walsingham pilgrims were wearing the well-fed and contented looks he liked to see on the faces of his guests. They had attended the local church, St Mary’s. They had exhausted the (not very many) possibilities provided by the little town of Mundham. They had returned to the Angel to eat and drink, and to enjoy a further session of storytelling. Every single one of them, even the hatchet-faced Prior. They were his for another night, especially while the rain continued to pour down drearily outside and the draughts rattled at the shutters. Again the fire in the main hall of the Angel was lit.

Despite the dark, sometimes violent, nature of the stories that they’d listened to on the previous evening, their expressions suggested they were ready for more. More darkness and more sin. Human beings were strange creatures, he reflected. Even when threatened by a pestilence that might wipe them from the face of the earth, they occupied the little time remaining not in prayer but in listening to tales of evil, sin and death.

And, of course, who had suggested this diversion but Laurence himself?

Now it was his turn. He was conscious of the ring of faces looking expectantly at him. He took a slow, appreciative sip from his bowl of wine and cleared his throat.

‘Anger is my theme now,’ he said, ‘and it is right that anger should follow sloth, for sometimes the only way to get a lazy person, a slothful individual, off his fat arse and going about his duty is to grow angry with him – or her. If I find a stable boy asleep when he should be taking charge of a traveller’s horse, or if my wife notices that the girl has not replaced the stale rushes on the floor here with fresh ones, then we may grow angry with the offender, for all our mild tempers. I tell you I’d rather be on the receiving end of my own anger than my wife’s. You should see her when she’s worked up! Yet who is to say that my wife and I are wrong to feel such anger, and to give voice to it?’

A few of the listeners nodded. Perhaps they were remembering occasions when they had chastised their servants or husbands or wives. The landlord of the Angel pressed on.

‘What we feel in such cases is surely a righteous anger. And, if I may say it without impiety, this is the faintest shadow of what God Himself feels as He surveys the bogs and fens of human wickedness. Indeed, we must believe that behind the pestilence itself lies God’s justified and righteous wrath.

‘But I am going to tell you a story of an anger that is quite different from this. There may have been some justification to it in the beginning, but it was bred in the shadows and fed daily with thoughts of vengeance until it grew to a full-sized monster that devoured all around it before turning on its creator. The story I am about to tell you, ladies and gentlemen, is true and it took place not so very far from this little town and not so very many years ago either. It was during that time of shortages and suffering when the father of our Edward III was on the throne. When it seemed as though Noah’s flood had come again, and without a rainbow for deliverance. Looking round I can see that scarcely any of you are old enough to remember those days…’

In saying this, the landlord was merely flattering his audience. Several murmured at the unhappy memories. Yes, they did recall those days, thirty years ago and more, when the sun never shone and the rain never stopped. With crops failing, bellies went unfilled, and no dog or cat was safe from the quick hands and hungry teeth of the poor. There had even been tales of parents driven mad by the pangs of hunger who killed and devoured their own children. Such terrible things had never happened in the teller’s own village, mind you, but they were reported on good authority by a cousin of a cousin or heard from the mouth of a travelling pedlar.

‘We must pray to Almighty God,’ said the landlord, ‘that he delivers us from our present troubles as he delivered us from our woes these many years past.’ He waited for the heartfelt ‘Amens’ to die down, before resuming his tale of…

Anger

Like any storyteller, I have to name names and places, too, and because the people are real and, in some cases, still alive, I must sometimes rein in my tongue. Yet believe what I say. In a village called Wenham a few miles distant from here, there once lived a family called the Carters. The land they held as tenants adjoined fields that were farmed by another family, the Raths. The heads of these families were William Carter and Alfred Rath. These families were the two most important ones in the village, leaving aside the people who lived at the manor. And they were absent most of the time attending to their other properties. The Carters and the Raths had once been friends, not good friends, perhaps, but good enough for the working day. Even if it was only self-interest, they helped each other when times were bad and they were glad together in moments of prosperity. Then something happened that turned all this goodwill into sourness.

No one is quite sure what started it. By the time I was aware of the bad feeling, it had already begun. Perhaps some cows belonging to William blundered across Alfred’s cornfield and caused a few pennies’ worth of damage, or maybe some of Alfred’s sheep trespassed on William’s pasture. I’ve also heard that it began with a dispute over a wagon that Alfred Rath had lent to William Carter when they were on better terms. When the wagon was returned in a damaged state, the borrower refused to admit his responsibility but claimed he’d received it in that dilapidated condition.

These cases went to the manor court where both men were fined. Yet honour was far from satisfied, because one man’s fine was larger than the other’s, so of course the one who’d got off more lightly went round proclaiming victory while his neighbour complained about unfair treatment.

Now, ladies and gentlemen, in such cases it must go one of two ways. Either the disputation and bad feeling gradually die down until things have returned, perhaps not to the old easy and friendly relations, but at least to mutual tolerance. Or things go from bad to worse, with every word or action seen in the most unfriendly light. A reported remark or a casual gesture causes fists to clench and curses to be uttered. Plain accidents or misfortunes, like the sickness of livestock or a chance fire in a barn, are blamed on the old friends even if the evidence runs right against it. So it was with the Carters and the Raths. They lived and worked alongside each other but one family might as well have been on the moon for all they wanted to have anything to do with the other. Then something happened that forced both families together… a crime that couldn’t help but drag in the two sides…

But first, I’d better say a little about the people in this tale. I can remember them clearly, you see, although I was a boy. William Carter was a lanky fellow, who kept himself to himself. He was a touchy man, a choleric one. Everyone knew him for a miser and hoarder. Nothing unusual in that, maybe, but William was the kind of person who’d keep his nail parings, not to prevent a witch getting hold of them, but in case there was a sudden market in nail parings. William Carter’s wife, Alice, was almost as tall as he and she had a beaky nose and close-set eyes, which made her look like a handsome bird. It pains me to say this about her, God rest her soul, but she was something of a snob. Her uncle was a priest, you see, and it was whispered that she was actually his daughter rather than his niece. If her husband was silent and watchful, she was a great talker and a gossip.

As for the Raths… they were not aloof and they didn’t put on airs like the Carters. On the surface, they seemed friendly enough. Alfred Rath was a small man with a round face and cheery manner, though there was a streak of malice in him and he had a wandering eye. His wife, Joan, was a plain woman and strong in her own fashion. She knew her own mind. While her neighbour Alice Carter gossiped in a way that some might say was mean-spirited, Joan looked out for the goodness in people, even when there was very little goodness to be found. Joan Rath had a cousin who was a doctor of physic, Thomas Flytte, and you could say that he is central to the story, because of what happened.

But before I say anything about Flytte, I need to tell you of the incident that turned the hostility between the Carters and the Raths into hatred. It happened towards the end of a wet, gusty market day in the village. Business had finished early on account of the rain – it was always raining then, remember – and the stall-holders were in the alehouse drinking away their meagre takings. There were quite a few of the villagers there as well, including William Carter and Alfred Rath. They were on opposite sides of the room, of course. Didn’t even acknowledge each other’s existence.

Suddenly, a woman burst in and announced to the world that she had lost her purse on the outskirts of Wenham. She said it was missing from her belt. Missing, not stolen, because she’d been walking alone and no one had been near her. The spot where it probably happened was at the junction of Nether Way and Church Lane, where she’d had to jump aside to avoid a great pool of water. She’d gone back to look for it but without success. There wasn’t much money in the purse, but it had value for her because it had been her mother’s. All this news came out in a single gushing flow, like the rainwater pouring off the eaves of the alehouse. She was obviously in distress, but nobody cared much. I don’t know whether she expected the alehouse to empty out while its occupants went into the rain to help search the place where the two lanes met but, if so, she was to be disappointed. Nobody moved and there were more shrugged shoulders than expressions of sympathy.

After a moment, Alfred Rath remarked in a casual voice but one still loud enough to be heard by everyone in the room that he was sure he’d seen his neighbour William Carter earlier that morning standing at the corner of Nether Way and Church Lane. Perhaps William could help in this matter? William Carter looked startled but didn’t deny he’d been there. As I’ve said, there was a streak of malice in Alfred Rath and, realising he had the advantage, he started to add colour to his story. Yes, he said, scratching his head as if to aid his memory, he had definitely seen his neighbour stooping and peering as if in search of some item that he’d dropped. Furthermore, he’d witnessed him pick something up and put it in his pocket.

The woman made for Master William, relief on her face. ‘Oh, do you have it, sir? I shall be eternally grateful if you do,’ she said. ‘It was my mother’s purse, hinged it is, and made of wool and silk. You can have the coins inside as reward but I would dearly miss that purse.’

William Carter looked uneasy, as though he was indeed guilty of picking up the woman’s purse. He hadn’t denied any part of Rath’s account, not searching the muddy ground nor slipping something into his pocket. Spots of red glowed in his cheeks. He glanced round at the ring of faces, all waiting for an explanation. It was obvious that he had to say something. He cast a glance of pure hatred in the direction of Alfred Rath. Eventually, he fumbled under his cloak and brought out from beneath it… a short length of rope.

‘Here you are,’ he said, and there was a mixture of anger and embarrassment in his tone. ‘This is what I picked up at the corner of Nether Way and Church Lane.’

He held up the pitiful fragment of rope so that everyone in the alehouse might see it. There were titters and sly comments. Someone said the rope was too short even for a noose. Indeed, it was too short for any practical purpose. The whole piece would have been used up by the act of tying a knot in it. It must have been cut from a longer length for tying a bale or leading a packhorse, and discarded in the road as worthless. But most people were aware of William Carter’s hoarding habits. He couldn’t help himself. He’d bent down for the rope and tucked it under his cloak out of instinct. And now that instinct was making him look miserly and petty in the eyes of the villagers. With another furious glance at Alfred Rath, he strode out of the alehouse, flinging the length of rope to the floor as he went.

A few of the more thoughtful customers might have felt a little sorry for Carter. Even I felt sorry for him, a boy, not daring to show my face but tucked away out of sight in a corner of the alehouse. He wasn’t a thief – unless picking up a useless bit of rope makes you a thief – but he was something that is almost as bad: a laughing stock. And a proud man like William Carter feels such an insult, feels it strongly, especially when he’s brought it on himself. Even Alfred Rath looked less eager now and he did not join in the general amusement that he’d caused. Perhaps he knew he’d gone too far. Too late for that, though.

From that day on, there was bitterness between the Raths and the Carters, and especially between the men of the households. Oh, and what about the woman’s purse, you ask, the keepsake from her mother? When she returned home she discovered that she’d never taken it with her in the first place.

Where was I? Yes, the physician. As I said before I started on the story of the rope and the purse, Thomas Flytte was a cousin of Joan Rath’s. He came from a village a few miles away, Woolney, but he’d soon shaken the dust of that place off his feet and gone in search of a better, wider life. He was a learned man, Thomas Flytte. He talked about his studies in Oxford and Cambridge and famous cities across the seas. He’d travelled and lived for long periods away from England, even going as far as the East. He said some of the greatest physicians and writers had come from there. He casually referred to the noble men and women who had applied to him for help – never by name but as the prince of this or the duchess of that – and no one would have thought to ask at the time whether he was inventing these people or whether they really existed.

He made a point of mentioning the elaborate preparations he’d concocted for those great men and women who lived in foreign lands. One, I remember, was a medicine made up not only of gold and silver leaf but of tiny fragments of precious gems like sapphire and garnet, all mixed in a honey or syrup. Obviously, you must be very wealthy indeed even to think of having your physician offer such remedies. Master Thomas had all the answers at his finger-tips too. If you were to ask him why gold was good for the heart, for instance, he’d say that the heart was under the influence of Leo, which is the House of the Sun, and that gold is the metal of the Sun. His talk often turned to the subject of gold.

So what was he doing back in a straggling village in a corner of England staying in his cousin’s house? Something had gone wrong, that was obvious, even if Thomas Flytte never talked about it. Perhaps one of those foreign princes or duchesses had died under his hands, when he’d promised a recovery, or perhaps he had been involved in some dispute with a more powerful physician in a royal court and come off the worse. Or maybe there was not much truth in his tales of travel and noble patrons, and he’d never gone further than Southampton, casting waters for the wives of shipmasters and town burghers.

If Thomas the doctor of physic had had money once, he did not seem so well off now. Looked at close to, his purple surcoat was so threadbare that you would see through the fabric in places, while the ermine trimming his hood was yellow rather than white and bright. Even a child could see this. Especially a child. Joan Rath persuaded her husband to lend him a mantle against the bad weather. She said it was the least he could do after what the physician had done for them… Well, I’ll come to that in a moment.

Thomas Flytte had a companion with him, a kind of attendant. This wasn’t a student learning physic at the feet of the master but someone whose idea of an effective remedy was more likely to be the point of a dagger than a pestle full of simples. He was called Reeve, this companion. I do not know his given name. Thomas Flytte referred to him as Reeve and so everyone called him Reeve, if they wanted to call him anything at at all, which wasn’t often.

Whereas his master, Thomas Flytte, was a short man with a bit of plumpness to him, as if he was still living off the fat of the olden days, Reeve looked as though he’d always been as spare as a fence-post. He said very little. When he did speak, it was as if words were coins, he doled them out so grudgingly. He dressed in drab greens and browns, and I think it was so he could pass unnoticed. I saw him once emerging from the edge of a wood, ducking his head beneath the branches as though he was coming out of his house. He was carrying a rabbit, which he’d just caught, unlawfully, no doubt. It hung limp and blooded in his hand. He saw me looking at him and he smiled a little smile, and I turned cold all over. That was Reeve.

The fact that Flytte the Physician was a cousin of Joan Rath wouldn’t have been enough by itself for her to give him houseroom. She hadn’t seen him for many years, I believe. Besides, he was accompanied by the disagreeable Reeve and that was enough to put anybody off. Something more was needed. And something more was very soon provided. Almost immediately after he’d arrived in town, Flytte showed that he was more than talk. Joan had a daughter of twelve or so called Agnes, who was sick, almost on the point of death, it was feared. The apothecary from the next town had visited and then the cunning-woman, who lived in the woods nearby, and each of them suggested various remedies, to no avail. The family resigned themselves to Agnes’s death. No food had passed her lips, nor had any words, no, not for several days.

Then, as if guided by providence, Thomas Flytte turned up and, within a few hours of examining Joan’s daughter and drawing up his charts and grinding his herbs and powders and mixing them in solution and easing a little of it down her unwilling throat, the girl began to stir and to talk a little sense for the first time in days. By the next morning, she had risen from her sickbed and by the afternoon she was once more sitting down to eat with her family.

It was a miracle! Thomas Flytte was modest or clever enough to credit it not only to his own skill but also to some particular herbs, which he had brought back from the East, plants that were not known in Europe. Of course, this made his presence in the town even more interesting. If Joan Rath hadn’t offered him his own quarters someone else would probably have done. The fact that Reeve was with him was overlooked, since it was evident that if you took one man you had to take the other.

Mistress Rath was able to provide the physician and his man, Reeve, with a dilapidated cottage, which she had patched up at her own expense and furnished, too. All this was in gratitude for Flytte’s care of her daughter, even if it was understood that he’d stay in the place only for a while. He must surely be going somewhere more significant than the village of Wenham, an important man like Thomas Flytte who’d treated foreigners and royalty. Wenham was a very ordinary village with only a small handful of well-to-do inhabitants, apart from the folk up at the manor. And, having properties elsewhere, they spent little time in Wenham but left their business in the hands of a steward. Joan’s husband, Alfred Rath, didn’t seem quite so glad at the physician’s stay, though he had to acknowledge that the man had ability. Some of the villagers went to consult him and paid for it and, although he didn’t bring anyone back from the brink of death as he had with Agnes, he impressed them with his talk and his expertise.

Not everyone was happy with Flytte’s presence. Of course, William Carter and his family made insinuations about him and said he wasn’t what he appeared to be. If they’d dared to, they might have accused him of witchcraft. Even so, I saw William and Thomas talking together more than once, and I think that he too consulted the physician. Then there was the local priest, Master John. Maybe he didn’t like the fact that a few of the villagers went looking for help to Flytte instead of him, and he certainly didn’t like it that money that might have gone to the Church coffers was instead finding its way into a physician’s purse. In his sermons, he preached against Thomas Flytte, not directly at first, but with little digs and warnings against men of science. Parsons don’t like doctors of physic anyway, they shy away from ’em as if by instinct. I’ve been told that churchmen are convinced that doctors do not believe in Our Saviour. There’s some saying about it on the edge of my mind but I can’t quite recall it…

Laurence paused and took a sip from his bowl of wine. And from the circle of listeners a learned man threw in: ‘The proverb you are looking for, landlord, is, “Ubi tres medici, duo athei,” which means, “Where you get three physicians together, two will be atheists”. Because physicians sometimes search out natural causes for unexplained things, they also encourage people to mistrust miracles, you see.’

‘Thank you, sir,’ said Laurence. ‘What a wealth of learning and wisdom there is to be found among the visitors to a tavern!’

He paused again to allow his audience to reflect on the compliment before continuing with his story. The pause was interrupted by a cough from the landlord’s wife, who was sitting near the back of the audience. It was the kind of cough that meant: get on with it.

There were others apart from the priest who were suspicious or resentful of Thomas Flytte. I mentioned the cunning-woman a while ago. She’d been consulted about Agnes’s sickness, without result. While the land to the south of Wenham was mostly clear, the area to the north was wooded. This wood stretched so far and the trees in it were so dense that it was always called the Great Wood. Anyway, the cunning-woman lived in the Great Wood, and like most such women she was feared as much as she was tolerated. The children in the village wouldn’t go near her. But some of the farmers and shopkeepers used to visit her rain-sodden hut to get forecasts for the harvest or to find out which of their workers was thieving from them. She was a strange creature with straggling white hair and touches of a beard, and yet with a hint of breasts too. Though she spoke with a singsong voice, some said she was a man or a gelding. Others said she had been a nun and was a woman of learning and refinement. Her name was Mistress Travis.

Thomas Flytte was very dismissive of Mistress Travis and her kind. He said that such women – and the cunning-men who ply the same trade – were like the stale leftovers of more superstitious ages. Word of this certainly got back to her even as the villagers who considered themselves more up-to-date stopped consulting her, and so the little sums of money and offerings of food she received began to dry up. If Thomas Flytte was concerned about this, or afraid of her power to lay a curse on him, he never showed it. Like his cousin Joan Rath, he was someone who knew his own mind. Then there was the apothecary from the nearby town who’d also been called in to treat Agnes. His name was Abel. He might have been expected to be jealous of Flytte but, in truth, he seemed eager to learn from the much-travelled visitor, keen to pick up whatever titbits of knowledge were going spare.

There was one other individual whose path crossed with that of Flytte the Physician before the crime occurred… and before a very peculiar situation arose… This other person was a pedlar who passed through Wenham two or three times a year. Hugh Tanner sold saints’ relics – bits of bone, fragments of cloth – to ensure good health to your cattle and clean water in your well, and all the rest of it. Unlike a pardoner, he carried no papal bulls, he offered no pardon for your sins and he wasn’t extortionate in his demands. On the contrary, he sold his wares quite cheaply, without much bargaining, and people bought them for that reason and because they felt sorry for Hugh Tanner. They were probably thinking… you might as well buy one of these for you never know what’s going to bring you luck or protect you from misfortune in this life, do you?

He was a fellow with hangdog eyes and a skin as leathery as if he’d been tanned himself. His sales patter hardly deserved the name and yet somehow he managed to make a living from travelling through towns and villages like Wenham. He brought news from other places, which was always welcome, and sometimes he even talked of London. Like the cunning-woman, he was supposed to have the gift, to be able to see things that ordinary people couldn’t see. But it was a gift he was reluctant to use, as if whatever he saw was nothing good.

I myself was a witness to the first encounter of Hugh Tanner and Thomas Flytte. Except that it wasn’t their first encounter. It was market day again but this time on a spring morning, and people’s spirits were light. Hugh Tanner couldn’t afford a stall but he settled himself down with his scrip on a little mound at the edge of the village because he judged the flow of people would be best there. It was where a couple of paths from other hamlets came together, and so old Hugh was aiming to catch people before they reached the stalls and spent what little they had. He wasn’t a complete fool, was Hugh.

I was there at the edge of the village, with Agnes Rath, as it happens. We were friends, and a bit more besides, but we had to be careful, very careful, over our friendship. I’d prayed for her recovery when she was sick, and despaired with everyone else when she looked to be dying, and then rejoiced when the skill of Thomas Flytte saved her. I looked up to the physician for what he’d done and I tried to engage him in conversation. I went up to him in the street, and welcomed him to our village, which was a bit forward of me. He could have cuffed me for speaking out of turn or simply walked by. But he seemed amused. He stopped walking and started talking, not once but on two or three occasions, and that’s how I found out why gold is good for the heart and about those remedies that are made up of precious stones. He was patient with answering my questions, which is more than my mother or father were. From them, or at least from my father, I got blows or silence, mostly. It was Thomas Flytte who predicted I’d make a good tavern-host. He said, you’ve got to like people and to be unafraid of talking to them and curious about their lives, while knowing when it’s time to rein in your curiosity. You’ve also got to have a business head on your shoulders. Of course, all this went over my own head, business or otherwise, when I was twelve, but years later I remembered it and now you see me, and my dear wife, settled here at the Angel.

Agnes and I were by the village wash-house. This was a tank fed by a spring and covered with a pillared roof but otherwise open to the weather. There was a bit of privacy on the far side of it, and we were lying on the grass enjoying the April morning and feeling the season coursing through our veins. For once it wasn’t raining. The wash-house was a good spot to be on market day because none of the village women would be doing their laundry, and when the two of us met we had to meet in secret. We were out of sight of Hugh Tanner and the people passing along the road but could see them by peeking over the stone edge of the tank.

Suddenly, we were aware of insistent voices, overlapping with each other. We peered across the tank. The pedlar and Thomas Flytte were in the middle of an argument. They were talking too low for us to catch even the occasional word but I could hear the anger in both men’s tones, like water boiling in a pot. This was surprising because the physician was not only a grave and learned man but also a calm one, while Tanner was not one of those pedlars who shout their wares at the top of their voices but just the opposite. Something about the way the two men were standing quite close together on top of the little mound of grass, and the hissing tones of their speech, showed that they’d met before. In fact, they must have done, because Hugh Tanner had come back to the village that very morning, his first visit for several months, while Thomas Flytte had been there only a few weeks.

Within a few moments, Flytte strode away, and Tanner flung some words after him. They might have been ‘Fraud yourself!’ but I couldn’t say for certain. Then out of the woods came Reeve, the physician’s companion. He rarely walked beside Thomas Flytte or even close to him, but was usually trailing at a distance, like a dog following his master while being distracted by other, more interesting concerns. Reeve’s presence made you feel uneasy but it also cast a shadow of doubt over the physician. You asked yourself what he was doing with a man like that for a servant.

As he passed Hugh Tanner, Reeve gave him a glance, which the pedlar was unable to return. Fortunately, a couple of market-day visitors appeared and Hugh gladly unpacked his scrip and spread out the bits of rag and bone that even he scarcely pretended were the property of the saints. Meanwhile, Agnes and I slunk off from our trysting-place behind the wash-house without being observed and went our separate ways, arranging to meet later. We couldn’t afford to be seen together in the village.

What was the reason the two of us couldn’t be seen together? Surely, you must have guessed it by now, ladies and gentlemen – such a quick-thinking gathering of guests and pilgrims as this is? As you know, Agnes was from the Rath family, the oldest of several children. And I… I was one of the Carters, the eldest son of Alice and a stepson to William. He was my mother’s second husband. I cannot remember my own father, though I do know that he was called Todd. It was from Todd that my mother had gained the farm, which she was allowed to keep as a tenant because she worked hard and, better still, she was able to make others work harder. Then she married William Carter, when I was small. From the time I can remember anything at all, it was William who was telling me to sop up the last spot of grease from the soup bowl or sending me out at night in the rain to ensure the barn doors were properly fastened. By the time I found out that my mother’s husband wasn’t my father, I’d learned to think of him – and fear him – as a father. So that’s how he remained to me.

Well, if my father had caught me in company with Agnes, he’d have beaten me within an inch of my life. And Agnes, too, would have suffered at the hands of her parents. The hatred and suspicion between the heads of these two families extended to every person in them, or was supposed to. I had an example of that a few moments after I parted from Agnes. I glimpsed my mother, Alice, talking with Alfred Rath on Church Lane. It seemed as though they were having an argument for her face was growing red as it did when she was angry and she was gesturing with her hands. Alfred was raising his own hands in an appeasing way but it made no difference and she turned on her heel and came striding towards me. I looked round for a way of escape and saw my father William coming in the opposite direction. Luckily, I was by the lich-gate to the churchyard and so I slipped through there and crouched behind the churchyard wall. Neither my mother nor my father was aware of my presence.

‘What were you doing with that man?’ I heard him say. His voice had gone very quiet, in a way I’d learned to fear.

‘The insolence of that Rath,’ my mother said. She didn’t sound daunted but indignant. ‘He says I need to attend to our boundaries. He says the hedges are overgrown and the fences broken. He is demanding I go and inspect them with him this very afternoon.’

‘You’ll not go, of course.’

‘What do you take me for?’ said my mother.

My father grunted in reply, and I thought that he didn’t like being reminded of the fact that it was my mother who had taken over the farm from her first husband, and the related fact that people usually went to her first with any complaint or request. Probably my father thought he ought to be the one dealing with any question about the boundaries. Except, of course, Alfred Rath wouldn’t have approached him any more than William Carter would have approached Alfred Rath.

My mother’s words soon passed out of my mind when I thought of my next secret meeting with Agnes Rath. But fear of the consequences didn’t put us off. There’s a Latin saying for that, too, and I don’t need anyone to provide it for me, thank you. Amor vincit omnia. Love conquers all. That was our happy state, Agnes and I. And you should have seen Agnes as she was then! Lithe as willow, with hair that tumbled down like a shower of gold when it was loosened.

You may think I have been talking about my father and mother without the reverence that is their due, calling one a gossip or snob, and the other a miser and so on. Perhaps I have spoken of them without due respect. But they are long dead and I can see them clearly now. They had faults, yes, and which of us does not have faults, God have mercy on us? But they had virtues too. I thought my father was an honourable man, who was prepared to be humiliated in the alehouse rather than be considered a thief. Thank God, he was not aware of the presence of his son that day when he was forced to hold up the little length of rope. We could not have looked each other in the eye afterwards if he’d known I was there. And though my mother may have been a snob it meant that she wanted to see her sons rise in the world, and because she had a churchman as an… uncle… she made sure I gained a little more learning than I might have been entitled to as a tenant farmer’s son. My mother’s uncle sometimes gave me lessons himself. I even picked up a few Latin sayings from him.

Agnes and I had appointed to meet towards the end of that same spring day, the day of the market. We had a regular place. It was on the boundary of the land that my father held against her father’s. Because of all the trouble between the two families, the hedges that marked the boundary were left straggling and unkempt, as if to discourage trespassers, and it was these same hedges that must have been the reason for Alfred Rath’s complaint to my mother.

In a remote spot, almost out of sight of any dwelling, there was a stile. This too was overgrown and broken down. Because there was no coming and going between the two families, no one had bothered to maintain or repair the stile. Agnes and I often met there, and one or the other would clamber over to the opposite side so we might spend time together. In the past there had been a path running on both sides of the stile and linking the two properties, but because of the coldness between Carters and Raths, there was no occasion for it to be used. Except by us.

It was early evening, with the wind shaking the blossom in the trees and the sun sending out his long beams from the west. A heavy downpour of rain that afternoon made everything smell damp and fresh. As I was on my way to the meeting-place, I thought I glimpsed Mistress Travis, the cunning-woman, on another path that bordered our land. She was running and her wild hair was streaming out behind her. It was strange to see her away from the Great Wood and the rain-sodden hut. But I thought no more of her and instead of Agnes Rath. As I approached the boundary, I could see my friend approaching from the other side through the gaps in the hedge. Between us was the stile. It wasn’t until I drew much closer that I noticed something draped over the dilapidated steps of the stile. I took them for discarded clothes but, nearer too, I saw that underneath the garments was a figure. At first, I thought he was asleep, then I thought differently. I shouted to Agnes to stay back but she was already as close as me.

If we had any sense we’d have turned tail and left it to someone else to make the discovery. But curiosity nudged us forward. Besides, I felt that this overgrown gap in the hedge belonged to us, and I was almost angry that another person should have been using it. Even if that person was dead. He was draped over the stile as he’d been if struck down in the act of crossing, with his legs on Agnes’s side and his top half dangling down on mine. His head was obscured. I crept closer still and got down on my hands and knees in the damp grass and peered up and sideways at the countenance of the dead man. I already suspected that it was Thomas Flytte the physician but I had to make sure.

The side of his face that was visible to me was swollen and mottled with purple like the colour of the threadbare surcoat he used to wear. There appeared to be a cord buried deep in the flesh of his neck. His eyes were bulging and sightless. It was obvious that he had not died a natural death. It was only later that I had time to experience any sorrow. This was the man who’d spoken kindly to me – and told me I might become a tavern-keeper! Here was the physician who had plucked Agnes from the jaws of death! But at that moment all I felt was a tightness round my own neck. When I heard someone speaking from the other side of the hedge, I sprang up and almost ran away. I thought of Reeve, Flytte’s companion, and half expected him to come slithering out from under the hedge. But the speaker was Agnes. I couldn’t see her. Not clearly, just an outline. She was more composed than me. When she spoke again there was scarcely a tremor in her voice.

‘Who is it, Laurence? It is not my father, is it?’

I suppose she thought this because the dead man had obviously been coming from the direction of her family’s land and house.

‘Not, it is the physician, Thomas Flytte.’

‘What are we going to do?’

‘We should raise a hue and cry.’

‘Yes.’

Even then, some instinct kept us from moving, though every moment we delayed in raising the hue and cry meant that the murderer of Thomas Flytte could be making his escape from the district.

‘Wait, Agnes,’ I said. ‘We cannot report this together. People would ask us what we were doing at this deserted place, and our secret would be out. Go home and say nothing. I’ll pretend I was out here by myself, wandering about, looking for birds’ eggs. I’ll say I found him, found the physician’s body. I will keep you out of the story.’

Laurence Carter paused in his present story. He seemed almost overcome by his words, by the memory of the body of Thomas Flytte hanging across the stile. There was a stir from the far side of the group of pilgrims and a woman spoke up. It was the landlord’s wife. She’d already made clear her feelings about her husband’s storytelling by coughing and then harrumphing loudly when he was making comments about the long-haired beauty of his youthful love, Agnes.

‘That’s not how I remember it, husband.’

‘No, my dear?’ said the landlord.

‘No. I remember you were too confused by the discovery of the body to think straight or to have any idea what to do. It was I who said that we couldn’t do this together and that one of us should go and raise the alarm while the other went quietly home.’

‘Well, it may have been so,’ said the landlord.

‘It was so,’ continued the voice from the other side. By now, people were craning round to look at the speaker. ‘And there are one or two other details in your account that were not altogether as you describe them.’

‘Perhaps you would like to take up the tale then, Agnes. To tell the truth, my throat is getting dry. I’d welcome another voice – and another drink. Come forward, my dear.’

‘Thank you, my sweet.’

Laurence Carter stood aside while his wife bustled to the front of the group. There was some amusement among the Walsingham pilgrims, as well as surprise, to see that the girl he’d been referring to all this while – Agnes Rath – had become his wife. And was still his wife. It was as if a character in a story had suddenly come to life. Agnes Carter cut a very different figure from the lithe young girl with flowing hair, as depicted by her equally young lover. She was a substantial woman well into middle age, who looked as though she’d take no nonsense from any of her servants or her guests. Her shape was concealed by a gown of dull red, like a dying fire, while her hair was tucked away beneath a wimple.

‘Oh, yes,’ she said, eying the room, ‘you are looking at me and all the while remembering Laurence’s description of me when I was a girl. Well, if I have changed a little, so has he. Thirty years ago, he was a… oh, well, never mind.’

The landlord of the Angel, now sitting in comfort as one of the audience, shrugged ruefully as faces turned towards him. He raised his bowl of wine in ironic salute. Whatever the small niggles between husband and wife, it was obvious that they understood each other well. Agnes Carter now took up the part of the storyteller.

There’s one thing that Laurence has not told you, which he did not know at the time. But I had it from my mother, Joan Rath. Thomas Flytte the physican was Joan’s cousin from the village of Woolney, and his companion, Reeve, was actually his son. My mother said this was common knowledge in the family but something never spoken of. If you looked closely you could see a likeness in their faces, around the eyes. Thomas had fathered the child before he left Woolney as a young man. It may have been his reason for leaving the village in a hurry, to avoid some forced betrothal. When he came back all those years later, by instinct he went first to the village to find that only his son was left. The child had grown to a man, but he was a shy and sullen one, who preferred to keep away from company. He was called Reeve because that was the surname of his mother – her father had been reeve of an estate near Woolney. The lad must have had a given name but, if so, his father never used it and simply referred to him as Reeve, as if to say: you don’t really belong to me but to that other person with a different name.

The father may not have wanted to acknowledge the son, but Reeve wasn’t to be so easily shaken off. He followed Thomas away from his birthplace and came with him to Wenham, where they were housed by my mother. The villagers assumed he was some sort of servant. Laurence says he trailed after the physician like a dog, and that there was something sinister or dangerous about him. I didn’t see that. To me, he was a rather pitiful creature. At first, anyway…

My mother also had a story about just why Thomas Flytte returned home after all those years of wandering. She believed what he said because she was truly grateful to him on account of his treatment of her daughter. As I am grateful to him, God rest his soul, for without him, I don’t believe I would be standing here in front of you. My mother and the physician exchanged confidences. He told his tales of travel and foreign courts. He showed her a brooch of yellow topaz. The image of a falcon was cut into it. He said that this was to attract the favour of kings. It was his most treasured possession.

Thomas told my mother that he had fallen foul of a powerful man in the court of Edward II. This courtier surrounded himself with a rabble of projectors and forecasters, some of them little better than vagabonds. Thomas Flytte was on the verge of a great discovery in the search for the substance that would transform base metal into gold, but before he could achieve this the courtier demanded the return of some money he had invested in the scheme. Thomas promised the man that if he was allowed to continue only a little longer he would be rewarded a hundred times over but the courtier was not to be persuaded. The physician had already spent the money, and his own besides, on the equipment he needed, so when the courtier began to threaten him with dreadful punishments and vengeance, Thomas had no choice but to return here to his birthplace in an obscure corner of the country. He was lying low, licking his wounds, deciding what to do next.

The landlady, Agnes Carter, paused in her narrative. Like her husband, but in a more genteel way, she sipped at a bowl of wine before returning to her story, and the moment when they’d discovered the physician’s corpse.

It was a strange talk we had, young Laurence and I. We did not raise our voices but conversed in loud whispers on either side of the crossing. I had a cooler head than he, I think, so I said that he should go back and raise the hue and cry. In fact he’d be punished if he didn’t do that since it was his duty and he was of age. Meantime, I’d return home and pretend that nothing had happened, if anyone noticed my absence and asked. Already I was good at adopting a guarded face – and keeping secrets. Despite what men say, women can keep counsel, you know.

Laurence took to his heels across the fields. But I did not return home straight away. I gazed at the body of the physician, or what I was able to see of it bundled across the stile. I did not mind being so close to the corpse. I almost felt that he should not be left alone, even though I knew I could not be discovered here when the people came. Then I started wondering what Thomas Flytte had been doing out here. Obviously, he was on his way somewhere, going from the little house where he lodged with Reeve to… where? Or perhaps, he had been coming in the opposite direction, from the Carters’ to the Raths’, and had met someone as he was crossing the stile. Or perhaps, some person had been lying in wait for him. I looked at the ground at the base of the stile but it was just tussocky grass. It was coming on to rain again. Close by was a clump of trees and I went there for cover, though the branches were still quite bare.

From where I was standing I had a good view of the protruding legs of the dead man. I looked down and saw something glinting on the ground. I picked it up. It was a tiny sheet of gold, or what looked like gold, set in a frame of wood. On the sheet was engraved the image of a lion. I’d never seen this object before but I recognised it all the same. It was one of the talismans that Master Thomas carried with him, and the sort of thing he bestowed on those he treated. I cast around on the ground under the trees but saw no more items. Had he dropped it? Had someone tried to steal it from him? Surely the little lion showed that the physician had been here under the trees. I could have dropped the talisman on the ground again, but instead I took it.

And now I examined the earth more closely, I saw the mark of boots or shoes pressed into the earth in a place where the grass grew more thinly and where the mud was still soft on account of the wet dripping down from the bare branches. The print of the shoes was deep as though the person standing here had continued for a long time without movement. I shivered. I crouched down and measured the length of the imprint against my outstretched hand. It was nearly twice the length of my hand. Then I stole off towards the corpse and the feet that stuck out on this side. Strangely I did not feel frightened or disrespectful but… merely curious. I placed my hand against the sole of the dead man’s shoe and realised that whoever it was that had left their mark under the trees it was not Thomas Flytte.

Then I thought I had done enough work for one day and I ran home, before Laurence should arrive back and the hue and cry begin. It was too late to do anything that evening and by the time the first villagers came out to examine the body, the light had almost faded from the sky. Anyway, nothing could be done until the coroner arrived. He attended the next morning. He had come from Thetford, as quick as carrion, eager to see what pickings he might get from the corpse in the way of deodands and fines. I remember his horse; it was a dapple grey hackney. He was accompanied by a servant.

In truth, that scene is clearer and sharper in my mind’s eye than anything that happened yesterday. Almost everybody in the village of Wenham, from priest to ploughman to hayward stood in the field close to the stile, the babies in their mothers’ arms, the children jostling to the front for a better view. It was a chill morning. The crows circled and the clouds pressed low overhead. But however grim the occasion, and however much sadness there was at the death of Thomas Flytte, you could sense excitement, too. Even the Carters and the Raths buried their differences for a time and exchanged a few words, though they did it warily, as if they understood that an unconsidered remark or a thoughtless move might bring trouble down on all their heads.

The coroner’s first question was to confirm that the body had not been moved. No, not moved? Good. So, whose land was it on? On a boundary, marked by the stile. On one side were the fields farmed by the Raths, on the other those of the Carter family. Thomas Flytte was discovered exactly between the two. His head and upper part were hanging down on the Carter side, while his lower half, his legs, were dangling over the Rath portion. It took some time for this to be imparted to the coroner, with both William and Alfred eager to explain, and somehow nudge responsibility for the body towards the other’s territory.

The coroner rubbed his hands. Perhaps he was cold or perhaps he was thinking that having two families involved increased his chances of making a profit. Then he ordered Thomas Flytte to be lifted down from the stile and laid out on some sacking, which had been placed on the ground. The overnight delay had caused the countenance of the poor physician to grow more mottled and bloated, while the body itself had stiffened, making it awkward to handle. When he was stripped bare of his clothing and his shrunken frame exposed for his injuries to be openly witnessed and assessed, there were expressions of real grief from the crowd. They came strong from my mother, and from me too. I noticed that even the Carters were affected and that stern old William seemed almost moved.

The Thetford coroner asked if anyone present could say for certain who the corpse was, though everyone knew. My mother identified him as her cousin from Woolney. Her voice was low but steady now. The coroner proceeded to examine the body more closely and determined for himself that the cause of death was indeed the rope wrapped about the man’s neck. It had been tugged so tight that it bit deep into the flesh, which had swollen up and made the cord hard to unfasten. The coroner ordered the attendant who’d ridden with him to retrieve the rope, and I remember it came away from the corpse with a tearing sound. Then the coroner held it up as if daring someone to come forward and claim it. No one did, of course. He kept the rope but it was thin pickings. There were no goods he could confiscate here. Nevertheless, the coroner took – for himself, no doubt – the topaz brooch, which was in a pocket. I hope he managed to attract the King’s favour with it.

No one said so at the time but much later, after the coroner had departed, someone remarked that the length of rope looked like the piece that William Carter had displayed in the alehouse to prove that he had not stolen a woman’s purse. The length he’d picked up in the street, when he’d been seen by my father. Even though it had happened a year or more earlier, everyone remembered that moment. Even those who hadn’t been present had heard of it. What had happened to that bit of rope? William had thrown it to the alehouse floor in anger and disgust before he stalked out. But had someone retrieved that rope and stored it away to use many months later to squeeze the life out of a man? It didn’t seem likely, but somehow it linked the murder of Thomas Flytte to the Carter and the Rath families.

The body was removed and the coroner departed with his servant. The physician was buried in the churchyard. Master John gave no sign of gloating at the death of a rival but took extra care with his funeral devotions, sprinkling holy water on the grave to drive off the devils that might trouble the burial-place of a man who had died so suddenly and without being shriven. Both the Carters and the Raths paid for daily masses to be said for Thomas Flytte. You could see why my family should do this, but the piety of William Carter caused some comment, considering how tight-fisted he was. People thought he was trying to compensate somehow for the body being discovered on his land. All this while there was no sign of Reeve, the attendant and supposed son of Thomas.

If the keeper of the King’s peace had been in the area, he would have looked into the death. But he was not, and so the crime went without investigation.

You couldn’t stop people talking about it, though.

And the talk in the village was of who might have so hated or feared Thomas Flytte that he had assailed him and left him dead in that remote spot. Some people mentioned Hugh Tanner, the pedlar. We’d seen the argument between him and the physician while we were… resting… near the wash-house, Laurence and I, and it appeared that Hugh had lost no opportunity of venting his anger at Master Thomas to all those who stopped to examine his wares, calling him a fraud and so on. Was he responsible for the fatal attack on Thomas Flytte?

Then there was Mistress Travis, the cunning-woman. She had lost some of her custom because of the physician’s words. Furthermore, she was feared because she was a strange, strong woman – certainly strong enough to attack a man, and with enough power in her upper arms to wrap a cord round his neck. Some favoured the cunning-woman. Others whispered that the priest had spoken out in his sermons against physicians and men of science – and they knew that Master John was resentful because offerings that should have come the church’s way were being diverted to Master Thomas. But then they recalled the priest’s care with the funeral and they reproached themselves for speaking ill of a man of God. And then finally there was Reeve. As I said, almost no one knew that he was Thomas’s son but the fact that he was nowhere to be found after the murder was enough to cast suspicion on him.

One thing was apparent, though, or it would have been to anyone who thought carefully about the matter. The physician had not been murdered by a thief, for he had been left in possession of the topaz brooch, which the coroner had confiscated. It was possible that the murderer might have been intending to search for something to take but had been disturbed by the arrival of Laurence and me, coming from opposite directions. But if that was so then surely we would have glimpsed him… or her? We said nothing of how we’d discovered the body together, and I certainly said nothing of what I had discovered under the stand of trees near to the stile.

Not until later, when I told Laurence, and once I had we couldn’t stop talking. We talked about the murder and, after we’d finished, we talked about it again. It was less difficult for us to meet now. Our families were not so watchful and the days were longer, even if the sun rarely shone. Well, the summer wore on and the death of the physician continued to cast a cloud across Wenham, even though at least one other villager died during those months. His name was Robert Short, I remember. But he was an old man and he died naturally, while Thomas Flytte did not.

Still there was no sign of the King’s peace and it seemed that justice would never be done. The gossip and speculation about who the murderer might be began to die down. One person who was cleared of the crime was Hugh the pedlar. He returned to Wenham at the beginning of the autumn and reacted with surprise when he heard of the physician’s violent death.

It seemed he’d not stayed long in the village that market day but departed southwards. He admitted he’d known Thomas Flytte in another place, as he put it, and that he thought the doctor of physic was – not what he appeared to be. When pressed, he admitted that he’d encountered Thomas Flytte in London. (And I thought of the story I’d heard from my mother, about the physician and the courtier who kept company with projectors and forecasters and vagabonds. Was it possible that Hugh Tanner was one of them?) But Hugh held no grudge against the physician. If he’d called him a fraud it was only because he’d been called one himself in the first place. Let every man thrive as best he can under the eye of God, was his motto. If Flytte was dead, and by violence too, then he was sorry to hear it. There was such meekness about him and his hang-dog air that scarcely anyone believed he could have choked the life out of the doctor.

If there was a shadow over the village there was a darker one over my own house. My mother grew quiet and no longer wanted to speak good of everybody. She seemed to be keeping separate from my father, and I thought she had been wounded by the death of her doctor cousin. She refused to do anything about the little cottage where the physician had lived with his son Reeve, but let it lie empty and my father did not seem inclined to contradict her. Perhaps she thought Reeve was going to return to Wenham even though he would have been seized by the villagers if he’d done so. But I don’t think my mother ever believed Reeve was guilty. Towards the autumn, she fell ill and grew weak. She spent long periods of every day in bed, so I had to take over many of the duties in the house. I am sure she wondered whether, had Thomas Flytte still been alive, he would have found a remedy for her affliction.

Perhaps it was to clear away those shadows that I wanted to find out what had happened. Or perhaps I felt I had an obligation to the physician who had saved me from death.

I had only two things to help me, and one of them was no more than a memory. There was the little talisman I’d picked up from the ground, the golden image of a lion in a wooden frame. And, though it no longer existed, clear in my mind’s eye I had the image of the shoe-marks in the wet earth of the spinney. From their size, I knew they were not the print of the physician’s shoes but belonged to whoever had been waiting in ambush for him, for surely no one would stand fixed in one spot under the trees unless they had a purpose. I struggled to see the scene through the eyes of that unknown man – for I was sure it was a man, from the size of the shoes and the violence of the attack – but I could see and understand nothing. Then I thought of the cunning-woman who lived in the woods, Mistress Travis. She had the gift, like Hugh Tanner. But, unlike him, she was prepared to use it. Many villagers went to her to find out things that they could not see for themselves, things happening just beyond the corner of their eyes and even things that would happen in the future. They paid these visits in an uneasy way, sometimes, and in defiance of Master John, but they paid them all the same.

At once, I was seized with the desire to go to the cunning-woman and show her the only thing which I had: the talisman. But I did not want to do this by myself. Laurence and I talked about it, of course. I think there were shadows over Laurence’s house too during that summer. His father was even more silent than usual while his mother would not stop talking, and they grated on each other like a knife against stone.

In the end, Laurence agreed to go with me. Perhaps he was as I was, half eager, half afraid to discover the truth.

Mistress Travis, the cunning-woman, was not so fearful to me as she was to some others in Wenham. As a child, I once got lost in the Great Wood and I ran into her, in my tears and panic not realising she was there. Though the first sight of her was terrifying, she spoke soothing words and took me by the hand and led me through a maze of over-grown paths until we reached the edge of the trees and when I saw the chimney-smoke from my home in the distance, I slipped out of her grasp and ran towards it without a backward glance. So I had no reason to be daunted by her. Even so, Laurence and I approached the hut in the woods in great trepidation. If we hadn’t been driven by our desire to find out the truth we would have turned and run back home.

It was a late afternoon in autumn and the trees were almost bare. The branches creaked. The way to the cunning-woman’s was not so hard to find, for other village folk apart from us were accustomed to beating a path to her door. As I walked, I clutched the talisman with the image of the gold lion. The hut was in a clearing where nothing seemed to grow, as though the ground immediately around it was blighted. The door of the hut was open, or perhaps it could never be properly closed since it hung drunkenly on a single hinge of rope. We came to a halt either side of the entrance. Mistress Travis was squatting on a low stool just inside. Her white hair curtained her face and the bedraggled smock she wore concealed the shape beneath like a tent.

‘You are too big to be lost in the woods now,’ she said in her singsong voice.

This was directed at me. I was surprised she remembered the frightened child.

‘I have my friend Laurence for company,’ I said.

The cunning-woman ducked her head slightly. She knew Laurence, of course, even if they’d never spoken. She knew everyone in the village and everyone knew her.

I waited for Laurence to say something but he would not even look the cunning-woman in the face, instead keeping his eyes fastened on the earth, so I stretched out my hand instead and said: ‘We have brought you something, Mistress Travis, an offering.’

The old woman put out a palm that was oddly smooth and soft. I placed the talisman in it. She tilted it so that it caught the little light remaining in the clearing. Her eyes were pure blue. She raised the talisman to her nose and sniffed at it. Looking at her, I thought that despite the hairs on her face, she must have been handsome many years ago. I remembered one of the stories I’d heard about her: that she’d been in holy orders and was once a woman of learning and refinement. ‘This is not yours,’ she said.

‘I found it.’

‘Where?’

‘In a copse of trees near a stile.’

‘Where the physician was done to death?’

‘Yes,’ said Laurence, speaking up for the first time. ‘You were there that afternoon, Mistress Travis. I saw you.’

The cunning-woman looked at Laurence. I could not tell whether her look was an admission – yes, I was there – or whether she didn’t know what he was talking about. I wondered why he’d raised the subject. Why should she remember where she’d been six months ago? Now she bent her white-haired head over the object that nestled in her palm.

‘For sure, it is one of the physician’s things,’ said Mistress Travis, examining the golden image tucked inside the little frame. ‘They say the image of the lion is a protection against the stone. It is also for those of a choleric disposition or humour and all other hot conditions.’

‘Then the physician must have dropped it,’ said Laurence.

‘No,’ said the crouching woman. She brushed her finger-tips several times back and forth across the little image and she cocked her head, as though she was listening to someone we could neither see nor hear. ‘Its story is plain enough if you have the ears to hear it. This passed from the physician’s hands into another’s. There was no loss involved.’

I thought she meant that the talisman must have been sold or given away, not stolen.

‘Whose hands?’ said Laurence.

I felt my heart beat faster. Mistress Travis did not reply. She clasped the talisman in both her own hands now and rubbed it gently. She raised her hands to her face and then cradled her cheek against them and closed her blue eyes. She looked like a child trying to fall asleep. Laurence and I gazed at each other. It was growing more gloomy in the clearing and the evening breeze rattled above us. We were startled by a sudden moan from Mistress Travis. Then, with her hands still to the side of her face and without changing her crouching posture on the stool, she started to speak.

‘The rain is coming down hard. He is walking along the path across the fields. He is moving fast because he is eager to see her. Anger and hatred boil up within me and cloud my vision. The rain is coming down hard even under the trees where I am standing and I wipe my hands across my eyes to clear them but I still cannot see clearly. And now he is drawing level with me and all I see is his arms swinging and his legs moving like knives. Soon he will be with her in the dry and the warm and his legs will be moving like knives, and hers too moving against his, and the anger and hatred boil over and spill down my sides. Here, at my side, somewhere at my side, I have a piece of rope that I have been keeping for just such an occasion. No, it is for this occasion now, as he walks past me so fast and then stops close to the stile. He is thinking for a moment how best to get over it without marring his clothes, and now is the same moment when I go and-’

The cunning-woman delivered all this in her usual singsong tone. When she stopped it was in mid-flow, as if she had been cut off by some external force. That was odd because neither Laurence nor I had spoken a word or moved an inch. But even odder was the fact that though Mistress Travis talked of anger and hatred her voice had not changed in its up-and-down style. It was as if she were reading words she did not understand out of a book. Gooseflesh rose on my arms and I felt my hair stir. Beside me, I sensed rather than saw that Laurence was just as horrified as I.

We waited, not certain what to do next. The woman lowered her hands to her lap. She unclasped them to reveal the lion-talisman crouching there, unchanged. Her eyes opened and, after a moment in which she gazed blankly at the two of us standing either side of her doorway, she came back to herself.

‘It is getting late,’ she said. ‘Home before dark.’

We were being dismissed like children. The inner chill I’d felt while she was telling the story was starting to fade, to be replaced by the outer cold of the evening. I wanted to thank her, even if I wasn’t quite sure of the meaning of what she had told us. I gestured at the talisman in her hand.

‘What do I need it for, Agnes?’ she said, passing it back to me. ‘I do not suffer from the stone and I am not choleric. Take it back and give it someone who has need of it.’

Even so, I was reluctant to take the thing and she sensed it was because I was frightened of the talisman brooch now and considered it unlucky. Mistress Travis said, ‘There is nothing to fear here. It was created to ward off harm and some small trace of that remains. The person who lost it under the trees cannot touch you.’

I reflected that I had already kept the talisman secret for the whole summer without coming to grief and so I took it back and thanked her in my stumbling way. Laurence said nothing. We turned away from the hut and threaded a path back through the woods. It was fortunate we were together and that we were not children, despite Mistress Travis’s words, for otherwise we might have been fearful of the gathering shadows and the sounds of animals settling down or stirring themselves for the night.

We waited until we’d reached the boundary of the woods before talking about the cunning-woman. Laurence was of the opinion that it was all nonsense. He said that Mistress Travis hadn’t denied being near the place where the murder occurred. Either she was making things up or possibly she had glimpsed somebody lurking under the trees by the stile but had no idea who it was. I reminded him that Mistress Travis mentioned the rope. She couldn’t have seen that from a distance. The rope wasn’t a secret, he said. Everybody knew how Thomas Flytte had died. The coroner had pronounced on it. In truth, the cunning-woman had seen nothing, she knew nothing. All that business with stroking the talisman and pretending to go into a trance was nothing more than foolery, designed to impress us, and all for the sake of – of…

‘Yes, Laurence,’ I said, ‘all for the sake of – what? Tell me. Because she didn’t want any money or gifts from us. She wouldn’t even keep the talisman. She was still speaking to us as children almost, telling us to get off home before dark. We are hardly worth impressing.’

There was a silence and I could tell he wasn’t pleased.

‘All right,’ he said. ‘Then, if we do believe her, it must be the cunning-woman herself who was under the trees by the stile. She was the one lying in wait for Thomas Flytte. Everyone knows she had a grudge against the physician. She’s strong enough to have overpowered him and pulled a cord round his neck and choked him. You know some people say she’s really a man.’

‘And others say that she’s a nun. But it didn’t happen like that at all. She held the talisman in her hands and, because of that, she was able to see through the eyes of… the person who possessed it at the time. Through those eyes, she saw Thomas Flytte crossing the field at a run because it was raining, she saw him pass in front of her and then pause in front of the stile. Or rather ‘she’ didn’t see all this but…’

‘Have you tried to do that thing, Agnes?’ said Laurence, ignoring everything I’d been saying. ‘Go on, hold the wretched object, rub it tenderly and see if you have any visions.’

‘Don’t be stupid, Laurence. I haven’t got the gift. Even her enemies admit that Mistress Travis has the gift.’

‘Answer me this, then. Why did she suddenly stop at the very point in her story where she was about to tell us what happened? According to you, she can see or pretends she can see through the eyes of the person who is spying on the physician while he strides across the field. Thomas Flytte pauses as he gets to the stile, and then this “person” goes and does… whatever it is he does. How convenient that she cannot tell us anything that really matters. She does not see the murder, she does not see the murderer.’

‘Not convenient, just fortunate,’ I said.

‘You’re talking as much nonsense as the cunning-woman.’

I wasn’t talking nonsense and Laurence knew it, I think. It was fortunate that the cunning-woman had not seen everything in her vision. It meant that the truth was still half-hidden, which was more comfortable for both of us.

‘I have been thinking about why Mistress Travis couldn’t see the murder being done,’ I said, ‘and it makes sense. I can explain it.’

‘Nothing makes sense,’ he said. I waited for him to ask for my explanation, which I was rather pleased with, but he said nothing more. So I was forced to speak instead.

‘Remember I told you I found the talisman under the trees, not by the stile? It was close to the foot-marks. I measured those against the boots of Thomas Flytte and it was obvious from the length of them that he was not the person waiting in the spinney. He was shorter than that person. Which confirms the cunning-woman’s words. She was looking through the eyes of someone watching the physician. Even the words she used weren’t her own thoughts and feelings, but his. It was his hatred and anger boiling over. His idea that the physician’s legs were going like knives. But she could only do that for as long as the man under the trees was holding the talisman. When he no longer had the talisman with him then she could no longer see with his eyes. The talisman is her link to… that person.’

I paused, waiting for him to agree, but also to catch up with my own rushing thoughts. Then a further detail occurred to me. ‘Or probably, he wasn’t holding the lion-talisman in his hand but he had it somewhere about him, in a pocket or fastened to his belt, and in his hurry and anger as he reached for the piece of rope, which he kept with him – remember Mistress Travis talked of the rope at her side, though it wasn’t her side but his – he accidentally dislodged it and it dropped to the ground-’

‘Where it was conveniently found by Agnes Rath,’ said Laurence, breaking his silence. There was almost a harshness in his tone.

I said, ‘Don’t you believe me, Laurence? I found the talisman where I said I did, and the foot-marks, too. I have told you no lie but only the precise truth.’

After a few moments, he said, ‘I believe you,’ and this time there was no harshness in his voice but only regret perhaps. We were out in the open by now and coming to the point where he would have to follow his path back to his house while I went off to mine. It was half dark, and I was glad to be out of the woods.

‘It could have been the pedlar Hugh standing in the spinney by the stile, or Reeve,’ said Laurence.

‘I don’t think so,’ I said. It didn’t seem to me as though the shoe-marks I’d seen could belong to either of those ragged individuals.

‘Very well,’ he said. ‘But whoever it was who was standing there, why did… that person attack Thomas Flytte?’

‘Do you remember the cunning-woman’s words?’

‘Oh, are we back to her again?’

‘When she described what she saw with the help of the talisman, she didn’t talk about anyone by name but simply ‘him’. He was moving fast along the path on account of the rain. His legs were going like knives until they stopped for an instant in front of the stile. But the man under the trees couldn’t see clearly. The rain was coming down hard. He had to wipe his eyes to clear them and still he couldn’t see properly. His anger cast a shadow over his vision.’

‘Yes, yes,’ said Laurence impatiently. ‘What does that mean?’

‘It means,’’ I said, ‘that whoever was lying in wait in the spinney was not expecting to see Thomas Flytte. They were expecting someone else.’

We’d come to the point where the paths divided and Laurence went his way and I went mine, without exchanging another word. When I got home, my father was by the gate to the garden as if waiting for my return. He drew me to one side by the water butts under the thatch. He wanted a private talk, away from my brothers and sisters. He asked whether I’d been with Laurence. In the old days, I wouldn’t have dared tell him but now the hostility between the two families seemed to have… not died away, exactly… but the heat and anger had been replaced by a sort of cold sadness.

I didn’t tell my father we’d been to visit the cunning-woman but I didn’t deny I’d spent a couple of hours with Laurence Carter either. In case he thought I was slacking, I said that my duties in the house were done and my mother, from her sickbed, had not told me to do anything else. My father waved his hand as though none of this mattered. He seemed curious rather than angry. He even asked after Laurence’s mother and father. I was not able to tell him anything at all beyond what I’d heard from my friend, that Alice Carter had grown very talkative while William Carter was even more silent than usual. It was almost dark and I sensed rather than saw my father’s unease at that point, and I caught some words he muttered under his breath. They sounded like, ‘I should not have done it.’ He saw me looking at him and quickly said something about the alehouse and the piece of rope, and I realised he was harking back to that morning when the hatred between the Carters and the Raths had taken poisonous root. The moment when he’d exposed William for a miser, and a ridiculous one at that. I had not been present, unlike Laurence, but the story was known throughout the village of Wenham.

Then my father turned aside, as if he was done with questioning me, and went back indoors. Before I followed him in, I went to the privy-hut, not only because I needed to go there but because my hiding-place for the talisman was a small heap of stones behind the hut. I did not dare carry the talisman with me for fear of losing it, as the person standing under the trees had lost it. The pile of stones behind the privy seemed best. After I’d hidden the talisman, I went inside. I ate something. I went to bed.

I could not sleep among my little brothers and sisters but lay awake listening to their gentle breathing and occasional whimpers. The autumn wind banged the shutters. I thought of what we had discovered, Laurence and I, at the cunning-woman’s. I thought of my father’s words, ‘I should not have done it’, and his too quick explanation that he was referring to the business in the alehouse and the length of rope that William Carter had plucked from a muddy path. In my mind’s eye, I saw the path that ran from the Carters’ to the Raths’ and went beneath a stile, and I thought how, though that path was used only by Laurence and me, yet it appeared curiously worn and trodden on. I remembered something Laurence had told me a little time ago about an odd encounter he’d witnessed in Church Lane between my father and Alice Carter. None of these thoughts made it any easier for me to get to sleep, though I must have done for the next I knew a bright morning light was squeezing through the cracks in the shutters, and so began a terrible new day. And the end of the story.

Agnes paused and the Walsingham pilgrims thought she was merely catching her breath. But, no, judging by the way she looked across at her husband, it seemed as though her part was finished and that the landlord was expected to take up the reins of the story again. Laurence Carter ducked his head in acknowledgement and once more stood to address the group while his wife resumed her old place towards the rear of the audience. Not a few of the listeners regarded the landlord of the Angel in a new light. They saw him as young man, the lover of Agnes, slight and eager. And all of them wondered what was going to happen next. His wife’s reference to a ‘terrible new day’ sounded very promising.

‘Thank you, my dear,’ he said to Agnes. ‘It is more or less as she says, our story. Though I do not recall that I was so unwilling to go and see the cunning-woman in the woods. In my memory it was Agnes who had to be encouraged. But never mind that. It was I who witnessed what occurred on the following day, and I will never forget the things I saw.’

Harvest time was over and all was being secured for the winter. I was working in the hayloft of the barn, which was near our house. I was helping a man called Ralf, who my father had instructed to patch up some rotten planking in the wall. He was using the wood and nails from a broken cart of ours, and I was doing the fetching and carrying for him, toting lengths of wood across the yard and into the barn and up the ladder to the loft and then down again for more. In truth, it was not very onerous work and Ralf let me carry it out at my own pace, which is more than my father would have done. It was a fine early morning in autumn, with the sun low and blazing in the sky, and burning off the mist. It was warm too. It felt like a mockery of the whole rain-soaked year.

Ralf had removed the rotten pieces from the external wall and cut the wood back evenly so he’d have a sound frame for his repairs. He was kneeling on the floor by the space he’d created, his tools spread around him. The morning sun streamed through and tempted me to lie down on a pile of sacking in the far corner. Ralf’s back was turned and I was about to take a short rest after bringing up the final load of wood when he said: ‘Who’s that? What’s the matter with him?’

There was enough concern in his voice to bring me to his side. I crouched down next to Ralf and looked. The barn was set to one side of the farmhouse and off behind it. In front of us was the little fenced herb garden, which ran alongside the house and which it was my mother’s job to tend. My father, William, was standing at the corner of the garden and staring to the east over the fence palings. He was cupping his hands round his eyes so as to see more easily against the glare of the sun. In the hazy distance was the figure of a man. If he was approaching our farm, he was doing so in a strange, looping style, sometimes veering off the path into one of the fields and then coming back again, sometimes running for a few steps before slowing down to a walk. At one point, he stopped altogether and seemed to be dancing a jig to music that only he could hear.

‘Jesus, who is it?’ said Ralf. He turned his head and looked at me. He had a grooved forehead with heavy brows, as though his own head had been hewn out of wood. I shrugged to show that I didn’t know who it was approaching.

Every village has its share of people who behave oddly, which is perhaps only to say that they don’t behave like the rest of us. I was familiar with two or three from Wenham like that, and I knew their shapes and their walks, but this figure was not one of them. It must have been a trick of the light, for with the sun behind him the figure seemed to be on fire himself, red flames leaping off his body. I glanced down at my father. He had lowered his hands from his face and he stood stock-still, grasping the fence. I had the odd feeling that he was waiting.

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.

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.

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.’