The Deadliest Sin (55 page)

She fell heavily onto the flagstones, but even that wasn’t enough to subdue her. She made a wild grab for his legs, sinking her teeth into his calf. Only by seizing her long hair and
wrenching her head back, did Father Thomas manage to prise her loose. He flung her backwards then hauled her to her feet, holding her own knife at her throat.

His leg burned. He could feel the hot blood flowing down from where she’d bitten a chunk from his flesh, but he tried to ignore the pain.

He pulled her over to the bench and pressed her down onto it. ‘Don’t even think of running or calling out,’ he warned. ‘I’ve an armed man stationed outside that
door up there, with orders to let no one in or out, and more men posted round the tavern outside.’

He hobbled to the bench opposite and sat down, keeping the knife pointed towards her. Her eyes were burning with hatred and he knew if he gave her half a chance she’d tear his throat out
with her teeth. The safest course would be to call the men-at-arms down here to seize and bind her, then hand her over to the Sherriff of Lincoln. She’d hang, there was no question about
that, but he didn’t want her to go to the gallows without learning why she’d done it. She hadn’t stolen the cross from the Cathedral – that much he’d already
discovered from Oswin – so why had she killed Eustace?’

‘Tell me, tell me everything, Meggy,’ he urged.

‘What good’ll that do? You’re not going to save me from the hangman’s necklace.’

Thomas knew she’d never believe him even if he swore that he would.

‘But I can save your soul. If you die without confessing such crimes as you have committed, you’ll burn in hell for all eternity.’

‘You’d like that, wouldn’t you?’ she said, her eyes flashing. ‘That’s where he sent her. That’s where they all sent her – to hell. Gives you a
thrill, does it, to think of her writhing and naked in the flames.’

‘Who?’

Her expression softened and a distant look came into her eyes. ‘My sister. She was a rare beauty. Hair same colour as mine, but twice as thick and long. Spent hours combing it, she did.
Everyone noticed it. They cut it all off, right in front of the jeering mob. That’s what did for her more than anything. The whipping she could stand. We’d more than enough of those
when we were bairns to make us hardened to it, but then they made her stand at the Cathedral door in nowt but her shift, for four Sundays, with her head all shorn and folks mocking and laughing.
Come the third Sunday, she couldn’t take the shame of it no more. She hanged herself.

‘’Cause she loved him, you know. To him, she was nowt but a creature to pleasure him, but she really loved him, that’s why she went to his bed. Course, they wouldn’t let
her have a Christian burial. Said she’d committed the worst of sins – pride for she’d set herself above God and taken her own life when it was His alone to take. Can’t ever
be forgiven, it can’t, not self-murder. She’d burn for it in hell, they said. They were going to bury her at the crossroads outside Lincoln, and drive iron nails into her feet so she
couldn’t walk and torment the living. But they’d done enough to her poor body. I wouldn’t let them have her. I took her and I buried her in the woods close to St Margaret’s
well. I thought the saint might bless her and keep her safe, even if the priests would not.’

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

‘Your sister was punished for being a whore?’

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘So you hit him,’ Thomas said.

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

‘And Giles?’

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘But as I told you at the beginning, Prior Wynter, it is pride that is the father of the other six sins. Oswin was proud of his knowledge and talent for summoning spirits and demons. He
exalted in the glory of driving out the Devil and wrestling with angels. He could control the ministers and minions of Heaven and Hell. But his pride was to sire its own punishment.’

With shaking hands, Randal unwound the long tails of his hood and pulled it from his head. His tonsure gleamed in the firelight. He lifted his head and for the first time met the gaze of his
fellow pilgrims. This time, it was they who turned their faces away as they saw the wild and haunted despair in his eyes.

‘You see, I did summon spirits and demons, just as I boasted I could. But now they come whether I call them or not and I cannot stop them. I see them everywhere. Imps with leathery
wings and cruel beaks peer down at me from the trees. Monstrous creatures with human eyes slither over the stones of the track towards me. Men, long dead, stretch out their rotting hands, trying to
pull me back down into their foul graves. Giles and Eustace sit on each side of me at the table whenever I try to eat, the blood still running from their wounds. I see demons crouching on
women’s shoulders, mocking me. I watch the birds of death hovering over the babies’ cradles. I am afraid even to look at a child, in case my evil eye should curse them. I am terrified
to sleep, for in my dreams there is no escaping the wraiths that bite and tear and suffocate me.

‘That night, in the disused chapel outside Lincoln, as I prostrated myself before that altar in front of my friends, I prayed that St Guthlac and St Hugh and all the Saints would give
me the power to summon the spirits of the air and earth, of the living and the dead, and they heard me. They granted me what, in my pride, I most desired. And that was my punishment. They are
dragging me down into their kingdom, the kingdom of the dead. I am already in purgatory and I do not know if I will ever escape it.’

He gazed around at his fellow pilgrims, his face contorted with despair. ‘If I die at the holy shrine of Walsingham, will the spirits leave me then? If the pestilence comes to take me,
will I finally be free from my torment? For that is my only prayer now.’

Historical Notes

Dean Henry Mansfield died in post in Lincoln Cathedral on 6 December 1328. The position was finally filled in the February, not by the subdean but by Anthony Bek, who had
previously been elected Bishop of Lincoln, though he never served as such because the result of the election was quashed. However, he subsequently became Bishop of Norwich.

Divination was practised by trained priests within the Church for a variety of purposes. The instructions they were to follow were carefully written down. There were many
methods, but they basically fell into three types. Sum mon ing – the calling up of spirits, angels or demons, to question them directly about the future. Scrivening – where, after
fasting, purification and mediation, a priest would attempt to read patterns in smoke or in blood, oil, wax or other substances dropped in water. Casting lots – after fasting and saying Mass,
the priest was instructed to sprinkle himself with holy water and ensure that six poor people were being fed as he cast his lots. He would then ask a series of yes/no questions such as: Will this
sick person recover? Should this journey be undertaken? Should the building work be begun on this day?