The Deadliest Sin (45 page)

This was part of the long quayside along the river, between the city walls and the bend in the Avon where it turned down into the gorge.

‘He’s gone off a bit, but no signs of violence,’ he added.

William decided he had better look for himself and the two men set off for the riverside. They crossed the entry of the Frome stream into the Avon, dug out in the last century to divert the
smaller river, to act as an additional defence to the city and to give some extra space for the burgeoning number of ships coming up from the sea. This was the maritime heart of the city, the
second busiest port in England. An unbroken line of ships lay against the wharfs, riding high on the flood tide.

Labourers ran up and down gangplanks with sacks of merchandise on their shoulders, taking them either in or out of the warehouses set back from the quayside. Wooden derricks craned bales and
barrels from the ships’ holds, and the scene was one of prosperous activity. For a moment, William was reminded of Jordan fitz Hamon and his wealthy father, who probably owned many of these
vessels.

As well as storehouses and barns behind the quay, there was a variety of other buildings, a few alehouses and some private dwellings, mostly small and often semi-derelict, to the point of being
little more than heaps of rotting timber. Many of the stevedores working the ships lived there in mean circumstances and it was towards one of these that Egbert made his way.

‘He’s in that one, probably been dossing down in there for weeks,’ he said, leading William to a ramshackle hut, which still had a sagging roof of mouldering thatch on walls of
rotting wood. There was a door, but it was half open, tilted back on the one remaining hinge.

‘Stinks in there, mainly due to the corpse itself,’ warned the watchman.

Once inside, Williams saw that the single room was half-filled with rubbish, but on the beaten-earth floor a figure lay on its side. It was fully clothed but the skin visible on the back of the
neck was swollen and greenish in colour. Several dead rats lay on the floor a few feet away.

‘He’s been dead a couple of days, given this hot weather,’ said Egbert. Both men were well used to visiting corpses in all states of decay, and the sight and smell did not
cause them any distress, The coroner’s officer pulled on the dead man’s shoulder to roll him face up, when an elderly man with grey hair was exposed. The features were distorted by
pressure against the floor as well as early putrefaction and a number of rat bites, but the watchman immediately said that he knew the man.

‘Don’t know his name, but I’ve seen him about the city for years, usually rooting in rubbish middens for something to eat.’

William crouched to make a cursory examination of the neck and head to exclude obvious injuries, but given the state of the flesh, he made no effort to look at the rest of the body under the
clothing.

‘Best get him taken on a handcart up to the dead-house in the castle, where we can have a better look, before he gets a pauper’s burial,’ he said, rocking back on his heels. He
looked around the derelict room and then frowned. ‘It’s strange that he has such good clothing upon him. This cote-hardie is of best wool under the dirt. Odd that such a beggar as this
would be so well-dressed, unless he stole the clothing.’

Egbert agreed, pointing to the man’s footwear. ‘Those boots are very fine, if you like toes as pointed as that. They must have cost a few shillings – and they are hardly worn,
if you ignore the rat bites.’

William looked more closely at the boots, which were of fine soft leather. In a number of places, this had been nibbled away, the edges being serrated, typical of rat bites, which were also
present on the old man’s face and hands. The woollen hose underneath was exposed in places, ripped and torn by the rodents’ sharp teeth.

Something in William’s memory clicked into place as he recalled helping the boot-boy shift some of his master’s clothing.

‘I wonder if he got these from the monks in St James’s?’ he said to Egbert. ‘The widow of Robert Giffard gave away a lot of clothes for charity.’

The watchman shrugged. ‘Maybe, but this poor old soul didn’t enjoy them for long.’

He suddenly turned away and stamped hard on the floor with his heavy boot. William saw that he had crushed the head of a rat, which had still been moving slightly.

‘May as well put the thing out of its misery,’ he said laconically, showing a compassion that was unusual in that day and age.

William looked more closely at the rats on the floor. There were three that were obviously stone-dead, though not decomposed in any way. Then his eye caught a movement under a pile of rubbish
and he saw another rodent, twitching and jerking slightly, its back arching spasmodically. Then it sudden went limp and lay still, obviously dead.

‘What’s killing these vermin?’ asked Egbert. ‘Is there something poisonous amongst this rubbish?’

The coroner’s officer rubbed his stubbly chin thoughtfully. ‘You may be nearer the truth than you imagine, Egbert. Let’s get this old fellow’s cadaver taken back to the
castle dead-house as soon as we can, before he goes off any further.’

The watchman went off to the quayside to commandeer a handcart to shift the corpse up to the castle, where a leanto shed in the outer bailey was provided as a temporary mortuary for bodies
awaiting burial. While he was away, William found an old sack amongst the debris in the hut and dropped the four dead rats into it, carefully picking them up by the tails, using a piece of rag to
protect his fingers from any noxious substance that might be exuding from them.

An hour later, they had pulled the clothing from the beggar, not without a few choice oaths at the smell both of the putrefaction and of the filthy state of the old man, whose last wash must
have been long before the King’s coronation. The boots and brown woollen hose were placed in a clean sack, the rest bundled up and put on a shelf in the deadhouse.

After thanking Egbert for his help, William went off to report to Ralph fitz Urse about his suspicions that there might be a connection between the beggar’s death and the tragedy at the
Giffard household. At first, the surly coroner ridiculed even the faint possibility that the two events might be related, but in the absence of any better explanation, fitz Urse grudgingly agreed
to his officer following up any leads that might strengthen the suspicion.

The first place that Hangfield went was St James’s Priory, to enquire what happened to the clothing that the compassionate Eleanor Giffard had caused to be sent to them. He found a lay
brother who worked for the almoner, who dealt with alms and all other charitable activities. This man, himself a Bristolian, knew at once who had been given some of the clothing.

‘So old Gilbert is dead, is he?’ he exclaimed. ‘May God rest his soul; he deserves it after the poor life he had. He was an archer in the King’s army years ago, but fell
on hard times.’

William, anxious to strengthen his tenuous case, cut short the brother’s reminiscences. ‘So you say it is certain that the boots and hose, together with a cote-hardie that you gave
him, came from Mistress Giffard?’

The other man nodded. ‘No doubt at all. It was I who received the bundle from that young lad who brought it from the physician’s house – and I handed some of it on to old
Gilbert.’

Satisfied that he was at least confirming some of the links in the chain, William’s next stop was the apothecary’s shop in Corn Street. He carried the sack containing the boots and
hose in one hand and, because of the stink, left it outside the door whilst he went in to seek Matthew Herbert.

The apothecary listened patiently while William explained the events of the morning and his idea that there might be some connection between the clothing and the death of both the beggar and the
physician.

‘It was the dead rats and especially the way one of them died that struck me,’ he said earnestly. ‘The spasms and the twitching, then suddenly dropping dead, was similar to
what happened to Robert Giffard. Surely, the fact that the clothing came from that house and was given to the beggar, who died soon afterwards, could be significant?’

Matthew was too polite a man to have the same scathing reaction that the coroner had shown, but he wondered if Hangfield’s devotion to his duties was stronger than the evidence he was
proposing. However, he was intrigued enough to humour the officer.

‘You say you have brought these boots and the hose with you?’

William nodded. ‘I left them outside on the street – I doubt anyone will have stolen them, as they smell quite badly.’

‘Bring them through to the back yard, where we can stay in fresh air.’

When William brought the sack through, he found Matthew sitting on a bench in the small cobbled area behind the shop. He had brought a metal tray, which he placed on the ground and asked the
coroner’s officer to place the boots and hose upon it. The smell was not too bad in the open air and William first lifted out the boots to show Matthew.

‘See the way those rats had devoured parts of the softer leather of the uppers?’ he said, pointing with a finger. ‘They must have found it tasty, as about a quarter of the boot
has gone.’

‘And you say the hose was poking out of the holes?’

William nodded, pulling out one thigh-length stocking from the sack. ‘Those vermin had chewed part of this as well; there’s a hole in the toe where it was sticking out of the
shredded boot.’

The apothecary studied the items, peering into the boot, apparently oblivious of the slimy state of the inside. He poked around with his finger, then studied its tip short-sightedly.

‘I’ll have to get one of my apprentices to look at this stuff; he’s got far keener sight than me.’

Then, Matthew picked up the stocking, made of fine brown wool, and peered at the ragged edges of the holes made by the rats. He took a small wooden spatula from a pocket and scraped around
inside the boot, then turned the hose inside out and scraped some of the slimy mess from the foot. William watched this with interest.

‘Is there something there?’ he asked.

The apothecary grunted. ‘I’m not sure. There is so much slime from the sloughing of the dead man’s skin that it’s hard to tell. As I said, I’ll get my lad, Stephen,
to go through it with his sharp eyes. Come back in the morning and I’ll tell you if I’ve found anything significant.’ With that, Hangfield had to be content, though he was not
sure if the apothecary really was hoping to make some discovery or whether he was just humouring him.

‘Do you want to see the dead rats?’ he said hopefully. ‘In case there is anything you can tell from the way they died?’

Matthew Herbert shook his head. ‘I don’t need dead rats, but I may have a need for some live ones,’ he said enigmatically.

Given the coroner’s lack of enthusiasm for William’s latest theory, the officer did not report his visit to the apothecary and carried on with his normal work,
checking on witnesses for an inquest next day on a boy who had been crushed by a collapsing wall in the city, a not infrequent accident, given the cramped building conditions and often the shoddy
workmanship.

That evening, he went home and again regaled his family with the day’s events. His small son, Nicholas, was fascinated by his account of the dead rats and chewed boots, asking for more
details of each morbid episode from the hovel on Welsh Back. His mother was afraid that this might give him nightmares, but with the resilience of the young, Nicholas slept like a log all
night.

Early next day, his father escaped from the castle chapel as soon as possible and made his way down to the apothecary’s shop, hoping against hope that Matthew Herbert would have found
something to bolster the conviction that the clothing had something to do with Giffard’s death. The apothecary left his desk and motioned him into the back room.

‘See those? Dead as mutton,’ he said, pointing at three dead rats on the floor.

‘But I didn’t leave them with you,’ said William, puzzled at the sight.

Matthew shook his head. ‘No, they’re not your rats, they are ones my apprentices caught for me yesterday. I needed them for a test.’

He explained that he had locked the three rodents in a large box, giving them some cheese and meat mixed with a substance he had scraped from the inside of the boots and soaked from the lower
part of the hose.

‘It killed them overnight, with the same symptoms of twitching and fits that you saw in your hovel on the quayside!’

Hangfield stared at the dead rats with fascination. ‘So what was it that killed them?’ he asked excitedly.

‘That was the hard part,’ said Matthew with satisfaction. ‘I thought I saw something in the slime in the boot when you were here yesterday, but my apprentice did much better
and picked out a few of these.’

He held out a small dish on which was a smear of brownish slime, embedded in which were a number of tiny yellowish spheres, each the size of a pin-head.

‘What the devil are they?’ demanded William, whose fairly good eyesight could just about see them.

‘You may well call upon the Devil, for these little things killed those rats – and maybe killed that poor beggar, as well as your physician,’ announced the apothecary firmly.
‘They are the seeds of the yew tree, and are extremely poisonous.’

Hangfield felt a wave of exultation that his intuition had proved correct, though he soon tempered this with thought of the difficulties that still lay ahead, such as how was it done and by
whom?

‘But how could seeds in hose and boots kill a man?’ he pleaded. ‘The death of the rats I understand – you gave it to them in food. That could not have happened to either
the beggar or to Robert Giffard.’

‘The seeds did not kill them,’ Matthew replied. ‘It was the substance around them that conveyed the poison, though that was originally made from the seeds.’ He sat on the
edge of a box in the storeroom. ‘Look, everyone knows – certainly all country folk – that the yew tree is very dangerous. Branches lopped from yew are never left on the ground,
because if livestock eat them, they may well die. All parts of the yew contain this poison, except the pulp of the berries. Yet the tiny seeds in the centre of the berries is very poisonous
indeed!’