Personally, I do not believe this. Not a word. In the first place, it means our Richard Rat-face would have had to get someone to marry him, and I heartily doubt there is a woman born yet who would agree to that. Even granting a marriage, impossible as it seems, it would mean that he had taken matters into his own hands—another fair impossibility right there. You might better claim the sun spends the night in your barn and get more people to believe you than that the sheriff of the March ever sullied his lily-whites with anything so black. See, de Glanville never lifts a finger himself; he pays his men to do all his dirty deeds for him.
To the last man, the sheriff ’s toadies are as cruel and vengeful as the day is long; a more rancorous covey of plume-proud pigeons you never want to meet. God bless me, it is true.
The folk of Derby still talk of the time when Sheriff de Glanville and three of his men cornered a poor tinker who had found his way into mischief. The tale as I heard it was that one bright day in April, a farmwife went out to feed the geese and found them all but one dead and that one not looking any too hearty. Who would do a mean and hateful thing like that? Well, it came to her then that there’d been a tinker come to the settlement a day or two before hoping to sell a new pot or get some patchwork on an old one. Sharp-tongued daughter of Eve that she was, she’d sent him off with both ears burnin’ for his trouble.
Now then, wasn’t that just like a rascal of a tinker to skulk around behind her back and kill her prize geese the moment she wasn’t looking? She went about the market with this news, and it soon spread all over town. Everyone was looking for this tinker, who wasn’t hard to find because he wasn’t hiding. They caught him down by the river washing his clothes, and they hauled him half-naked to the sheriff to decide what to do with the goose-killer.
As it happened, some other townsfolk had rustled about and found a serf who’d broken faith with his Norman lord from somewhere up north. He’d passed through the town a day or so before, and the fella was discovered hiding in a cow byre on a settlement just down the road. They bound the poor fella and dragged him to town, where the sheriff had already set up his judgement seat outside the guildhall in the market square. De Glanville was halfway to hanging the tinker when the second crowd tumbles into town with the serf.
So now. What to do? Both men are swearing their innocence and screaming for mercy. They are raising a ruck and crying foul to beat the devil. Well, the sheriff can’t tell who is guilty of this heinous crime, nor can anyone else. But that en’t no matter. Up he stands and says, “You call on heaven to help you? So be it! Hang them both, and let God decide which one shall go to hell.”
So his men fix another noose on the end of the first rope, and it’s up over the roof beam of the guildhall. He hangs both men in the market square with the same rope—one wretch on one end, and one on t’other. And that is Richard bloody de Glanville for you beginning and end . . .
What’s that, monk?” I say. “You think it unlikely?”
Odo sniffs and wrinkles his nose in disbelief. “If you please, which one of them killed the geese?”
“Which one? I’d a thought that would be obvious to a smart fella like you, Odo. So now, you tell me, which one did the deed?”
“The tinker—for spite, because the farmwife refused to buy his pots or give him work.”
“Oh, Odo,” I sigh, shaking my head and tutting his ignorance. “It wasn’t the tinker. No, never him.”
“The serf then, because he . . .” He scratches his head. “Hungry? I don’t know.”
“It wasn’t the serf, either.”
“Then who?”
“It was a sneak-thief fox, of course. See, Odo, a man can’t kill a goose but that the whole world knows about it. First you gotta catch the bloody bird, and that raises the most fearsome squawk you ever heard, and that gets all the others squawking, too. By Adam’s axe, it’s enough to wake the dead,