The whole album is one long narrative. The Rakes song is told from the perspective of one of the villains.

Taken from wiki:

The Hazards of Love is a rock opera, with all songs contributing to a unified narrative, similar to the use of recurring stories in The Crane Wife. The plot is a love story: a woman named Margaret (voiced by Stark) falls in love with a shape-shifting boreal forest dweller named William (voiced by Meloy). William's mother, a jealous fairy queen (voiced by Worden) and the villainous Rake (also voiced by Meloy) bring conflict to the album's story arc.[2]
>> ^bareboards2:

I just spent 15 minutes trying to discover if this song was a traditional folk ballad -- "murder ballad" is the type of song, I discovered.
Nope. Just a masterful modern evocation of an old tradition.
Chilling.