Sin Eater: A Novel Read online

  It was right that I was made a sin eater. I am vile. I am filthy. I turn from the cell and run past the guards, up, up and away, trying to outrun my guilt, my regret, my grief.

  10. BITTER GREENS

  I run out of the castle. I run through town and don’t stop until I reach the great Makerhall in the town square. I think somehow if I can hear the High Makerman’s prayers or dip my hand in the light from the coloured windows, mayhap I can be clean again. I don’t know what else to do.

  The road is full of folk in their white clothes on their way to noontide service. I push straight through, my breath all caught up in my chest. Forgive me, Ruth.

  Ahead of me, I see the statues of Hagi Saul and Hagi Gabriel cut into the stone beside the Makerhall doors. I hear folk saying, ‘Peace to you,’ and the Makermen just inside the doors answering back the same way.

  But before I make it in the door, there’s a sharp hiss in my face, then the crook of a Makerman’s staff an inch from my nose. ‘The sin eater will not defile the Maker’s house!’ a voice shrieks.

  Folk stutter and spin away all around me. The Makerman jabs his staff forward, hitting me hard in the pocket of my shoulder. Another blow strikes my ear from the side. I look up to see a second Makerman raising his staff to strike. ‘Sin monger!’ he yells.

  I turn to flee, but there’s too many folk coming in for me to move away. A man nearby starts yelling along with the Makerman, ‘Sin monger!’ Then, somefolk’s hat whips at my back, hard enough to bite. Another folk takes off his hat and hits me with it too. The cries of ‘Sin monger’ get louder than the ‘Peace to yous’ until they’re all I can hear. It seems everyfolk is yelling and hitting, shoving and herding me back from the door. I can’t see through the bodies and hats striking me, but suddenly I lose my footing, and I’m tumbling along with a young girl down into the ditch beside the road. The girl’s mother screams and pulls the girl up by the arm, swatting her across the bottom for shame and hugging her for comfort all at the same time. I wait in the ditch with my hands covering my head until I’m sure no folk are still striking me.

  The crowd has gone quiet. I look up at the line of folk outside the Makerhall. They have turned away, shading their faces with their hands. None cry ‘Sin monger’ any more. A moment passes. I start to hear quiet ‘Peace to yous’ up by the door again. The queue begins to move. The folk file into the Makerhall until the road above me is empty.

  Dirty water’s soaking up into my shift. I feel it cold across my left thigh and bottom. What I think is, I’ve no soap at Ruth’s house.

  The other thoughts of guilt and regret and grief are there too, but for some reason it’s the soap that sticks. I swallow a little giggle. Soap.

  I climb out of the ditch. I can hear the High Makerman starting the service inside. ‘O Maker, have mercy upon us miserable sinners.’

  My lips move without thinking, along with the response, ‘May it be.’

  I always loved saying ‘May it be’ at the end of each prayer. Hearing everyfolk uttering my name, May, like I was part of the Maker’s prayers and mysteries.

  Outside the door, I look at the statue of Hagi Gabriel. His face is kinder than Hagi Saul’s, and his hands open at his sides in welcome. But there’s nothing welcoming here.

  The High Makerman goes on. ‘Dear brethren, we assemble to give thanks for the great benefits we receive at the Maker’s hands.’ What benefits have I received? I can’t think of a one.

  Every folk answers again, but this time, like Hagi Gabriel, I’m quiet.

  The graveyard has lots of markers, some worn down, some with edges still square. One marker has a picture scratched on its back in white chalk: an x with eyes on either side. Witch’s markings, most like.

  There’s just a small stone for Da. It was all I could pay for. I lie down on the green shoots of grass over his grave. My shift sticks to the back of my legs, and my cunny is wet with dirty ditch water. I lie for a long time. The sky above me becomes dark and cold. Stars come out through clouds that look like carrot tops. Lying above Da’s bones like on a bed, I understand why sin eaters were made. Carrying such feelings is too much for one little heart, too much for one body. There must be some hope of shedding regret, grief, sorrow, sloughing them off like a skin and going into death free and light. Else we’d never be able to live.

  Night airs bring fever. I’ll wait for them to seep into my nose and eyes and ears. They’ll dry up my life, and I’ll leave this world. Whether I’ll go to Eve or the Maker, I don’t know.

  The moon passes above me, lighting a beech tree thick with new leaves. I wait. But nothing happens. After days of filling my belly, I’m coursing with life, warm and sound, and itching to move. The Makermen wouldn’t help me. Now death won’t either.

  I roll over so I can see Da’s stone. I stick my finger in our etched name. O-W-E-N-S, I trace the letters over. Grey grit gets caught in my fingernail. I trace the letters again. The wide O. The doubled-up W. The E and N. The S to finish. I do it again. And again. Over and over until my thoughts get plain. If I’m to live, then I need to fix this mess. I fold my hands.

  Ruth, I pray, I vow to make this right.

  I will prove myself Da’s daughter and repair things.

  May it be.

  May it be.

  May it be.

  11. NEAT’S TONGUE

  IT’S WITCHING HOUR. Even the whores are tucked away when I walk down tavern row towards home. I feel a swell of relief when I smell the first stink of Dungsbrook. Soon I’ll be tucked away in my home too.

  I turn onto my lane. I pass the path to the woad yard and the Domus Conversorum. For a moment, I think I hear a flute coming from the old, stone ruin where Jews had to live until they converted to the new faith. My guts get light thinking about unconverted souls that might be trapped in the building, but it’s not spirits I hear, just wind passing through its crumbling chimney.

  I’m still shaking off the shivers in my guts when I step up to my door, so I don’t notice the shadows coming round the side of the house. One slips between me and the door, one blocks the road, just like rogue cut-throats. Which is what they must be. Black Fingers’s men sent to finish what he began.

  Only a little while ago, I was wishing for death to take me, but now that it’s come knocking, I want none of it. The cut-throat in the road is a thick man with a kerchief across his lower face. He raises a short sword. Without thought, I barrel into the second cut-throat standing at my door. His own sword’s in his hand, but still at his side. Though I’m smaller than him, he stumbles back. The shoddy doorframe gives way, and the two of us fall through, landing hard in the main room of my house.

  I scramble off the second cut-throat as quick as I can. He’s scrambling too, his breath coming heavy.

  ‘Stick her!’ yells the first cut-throat through his kerchief. He’s blocking the doorway. The second cut-throat is back on his feet a few paces from me. He raises his blade. I dart towards the back door, but he cuts over in front of it before I get there. I stumble back towards the hearth. A cut-throat at each door. I’m trapped.

  I grab wildly behind me. My hand finds the old pot. I fling it at the second cut-throat, but he ducks easily.

  ‘Stick her!’ the first cut-throat yells again from the doorway, and the second cut-throat takes a step towards me.

  As I shrink back in the corner waiting for his blow, my foot treads on something. Suddenly there’s movement behind me. I cry out in startlement, but I’m not the only one making noise.

  ‘What the fug is that?’ the second cut-throat cries. He raises his sword, but in protection not attack.

  I wheel around to see a misshapen horror rising inches from me. Black, looming eyes. A sunken hole for a nose. A wrinkled maw with shattered teeth. Brida.

  ‘It’s the very devil,’ whispers the first cut-throat from the doorway.

  Brida’s ragged shawl falls from her body. The low hearth light flickers across her sunken pit of a shoulder. She raises the shaft of bone that f
inishes one arm and aims it at me. ‘She cursed me,’ comes Brida’s little voice. ‘I was once a man like you. I came to do her harm, but she cursed me so. Look at my man parts now.’ Brida lifts her skirt to show her cunny.

  The second cut-throat begins to pray. Brida staggers towards him on legs wet with weeping sores. ‘If you harm the sin eater, you will share my curse.’

  The first cut-throat has already fled the doorway, leaving it open for the second cut-throat to follow. He wastes not a moment thundering out in his heeled boots.

  ‘Broke the doorframe entirely.’ Paul climbs down the loft’s ladder.

  ‘Run off like rabbits,’ an unfamiliar voice sounds from behind him. ‘Good show, Brida. Inspired improvisation!’

  My heart is thumping, and my arms feel light and tingly. Still, I note that my vagabonds have returned. And increased, like mould or toadstools.

  ‘My apologies,’ the new man says. ‘Paul and I violated the intimate chamber. We heard a scuffle at the door and fled.’

  ‘You waste words, Frederick,’ says Paul. ‘She’s a sin eater; she doesn’t speak.’

  ‘But she can hear, can she not?’

  ‘What does it matter?’ Paul says back.

  ‘Beasts are calmed by the voice,’ says Frederick. ‘Even pig men speak to their sows before the slaughter.’ He bites playfully at the air. ‘I’ll keep her from gobbling us up.’

  Brida sets herself down by the hearth. Paul goes to build up the fire for her. After the unkind way he’s spoken to her before, I’m surprised by his care.

  Brida’s spent by her act. As my heart calms, I find I am too. But I look over this Frederick before I go to my bed. He’s older, the age my da was when he passed. But he’s healthy and better dressed than Paul and Brida. Working at some trade. But not a reputable one or he’d be at an inn. I don’t expect any more notice from a man who likened me to a sow, but as I cross to the ladder, Frederick calls out, eyes looking past my shoulder, ‘I solicit pardon for our poor manners. Paul has Saturn’s spleen. We do her wrong that would be, should she deign to accept us, our most gracious host.’

  An actor. One, I suspect, who’s mocking me. I need quiet for my nerves to settle, not a house of rude vagabonds and grown pantoboys. I climb the ladder to the loft.

  There’s still a little tingle left in my arms. Cut-throats are as suspicious as any folk, I reassure myself. They aren’t like to come back. And yet what Grey Beard said in the dungeon wasn’t true. Black Fingers is willing to murder the only sin eater. I am expendable. Mayhap he’s having the recorder make another sin eater right now. My heart starts its thumping again. How do I stop Black Fingers from coming after me?

  He certainly could be the one who poisoned the women and placed deer hearts on their coffins. Mayhap if I sort out the mess, he’ll be executed. My heart thumps soften a hair. I just need to sort out this mess.

  If it were a jammed lock, how would Da fix it?

  Let it tell you.

  I lie back and wait. My stitches itch. I do my best not to touch them. My shift is stiff from the dirty ditch water. I crinkle the cloth with my hand to soften it. Then my foot starts to jiggle. I take another breath and try to listen to the lock again.

  Finally, finally, something speaks. But it’s not the lock, it’s my noticings from the past days. The noticings I told to walls or stones or swallowed whole. Corliss and Tilly were both poisoned. What have they in common? Not much. Corliss was highborn and Tilly hardly more than a servant. But Corliss was a governess, so she would have lived in the household with the Queen when she was a girl. Tilly said she did too. So they were together in the house where Bethany lived growing up. It was Bethany’s stepmother’s house. The old king’s last wife, Katryna.

  I wait for more noticings to come. Instead, Frederick’s voice comes through the floorboards like bees. It’s bothersome. But then it’s calming too, the chitter and chatter of a home. I stick my hand in between my thighs where it’s warm, and the flesh feels like bread dough. There’s more flesh there than before, I think, as I listen to my vagabond squatters.

  It sounds as if Frederick and his acting troupe have come to town to play in some revels. The Norman prince, who is a stranger and an enemy, is sending an emissary to ask for Queen Bethany’s hand in marriage to make an alliance.

  ‘She’ll never marry the Norman prince,’ says Paul. ‘He’s Eucharistian.’

  ‘I would put money on the Queen’s secretary,’ says Frederick. ‘I heard the Queen stabbed a serving girl’s hand for batting eyes at him. She’s said to be quite the jealous lover.’

  ‘You don’t believe she’s a virgin?’ Brida asks.

  ‘They say the Norman prince sent a doctor here to perform a test to see if she is,’ answers Frederick.

  Brida clucks her tongue. ‘She’d lose her throne if she’s not a virgin. She’s unmarried.’

  I hear Frederick’s laugh. ‘Then no folk better find her out. It’s all a great pageant anyhow. Pageantry is power. The Virgin Queen. Now that is quite a role,’ Frederick laughs again. ‘If she were clever, and I believe she is, she would encourage her likeness to the Holy Virgin and convince everyfolk she has divine right to the throne. Why would she want to marry anyhow? All she’d get is a king to take all the decisions himself and leave her sewing in the corner.’

  ‘Then why the suitors?’ asks Brida.

  ‘Why, Brida,’ says Frederick saucily. ‘How does the courtesan keep her conquests happy? By making each and every one believe he has her heart.’

  ‘Oh, Freddie,’ chastens Brida. Likening the Queen to a courtesan is a fine way to lose your head. ‘But she needs an heir.’

  ‘Mmm,’ agrees Paul. ‘Or the throne goes to . . . well, now, who does it go to?’

  ‘There’s a question,’ picks up Frederick. ‘Let’s see. Maris and Bethany’s father had six wives. All the children are now dead, except our dear Queen, Maker keep her.’

  ‘What about the king’s last wife?’ asks Paul.

  ‘Katryna.’

  ‘Didn’t Katryna have a daughter with her next husband, the Baron Seymaur?’ says Paul. ‘Surely the daughter has a strong claim.’

  ‘No, you see, the old king had royal blood,’ Frederick’s voice gets louder like Gracie Manners’s would when she knew something none of the rest of us did. ‘His wives were only queens because they were married to him. When he died, Katryna wasn’t queen any more. She became the dowager queen, which is simply an honorific that means next to nothing. The moment the king died, the throne passed to his eldest child, Maris.’

  Brida speaks, ‘So who’s next in line?’

  ‘No folk knows,’ Frederick answers. ‘Queen Bethany must either produce an heir or name a successor. The Eucharistians hope she will name her Northern cousin. The Norman prince hopes to wed and get a child on her, as does every lord in Angland. The only thing we know is that once Bethany has an heir, she will lose a good part of her power. Everyfolk will be wanting to charm the heir instead of her. That’s why I wager she doesn’t accept any of her suitors.’

  ‘At least the Norman emissary will have the revels to enjoy before bringing Bethany’s refusal to his prince,’ says Paul. ‘Poor bugger.’

  ‘It will be splendid! A feast with jugglers and music and our little play as its capstone.’ Frederick goes on. ‘Paul, you would not believe the production. They’ve demanded we build an entire stage with multiple scenery panels and a device to raise and lower them!’

  ‘Multiple panels?’ asks Paul.

  ‘It seems some Anglish lord or other witnessed the Italians changing the scenery from act to act during their plays. I suspect the scenery did not move at all; the lord was simply drunk.’ Brida snorts in laughter. ‘But jests aside, the lord provided drawings of a rope and pulley system fitted to drop a flat panel from above the stage into a groove on the stage floor. Imagine, a scenery panel hanging above the stage as you are performing. Sword of Damocles, indeed.’

  ‘And what will you play?’ asks Paul.r />
  ‘Something diverting, but not too taxing, composed by the Cambridge wits,’ says Frederick.

  ‘And who will play the young ladies?’ asks Paul in a tight kind of way. ‘Is it Andrew? It is, isn’t it?’

  ‘Do you remember when you played Dame Custance?’ says Frederick, as if it follows on Paul’s question. ‘It was in Leicester Town, where the mercers’ guild was defiling the Fall of Man, have I got it right?’

  Paul laughs. ‘The mayor asked if we had anything that “skirted the faith” as he put it.’

  ‘Skirted the faith?’ says Brida.

  ‘All were afeard of the faith plays at that time,’ says Paul. ‘You never knew who you might offend.’

  ‘It was a reprieve, in truth,’ says Frederick. ‘After years of arriving to town, appearing to the mayor, and having him ask if we might play a little interlude entitled The Second Shepherd’s Play.’

  ‘How many times did we perform it?’

  ‘A dozen times a summer. Two dozen! And when new plays abound,’ says Frederick. ‘Ralph Roister Doister we chose in Leicester Town. Heavens above, you were a good player – are, you are a good player.’ Frederick corrects. ‘Apologies, that was thoughtless of me.’

  ‘No, no, you have the right of it. That life is done,’ Paul answers quick, but the happy in his voice is gone. There’s a sound like drinking and the clunk of a jug being set down.

  ‘Oh, I haven’t told you the best part,’ Frederick says like he’s trying to cheer Paul. ‘The revels, including our play, are meant to take place inside a great tent pitched in a field east of the castle.’

  ‘In a field?’ asks Brida. ‘Whyever would they do such a thing?’

  Frederick’s voice gets louder again. ‘It’s plainly meant to recall the exquisite spectacle of the Queen’s father. The old king once had a great tent of gold cloth built in which to meet a Norman ally. He hosted the most magnificent revels ever witnessed on these shores.’ Frederick drinks, then sighs. ‘I’ve witnessed a tent atop a stage, but never a stage within a tent. It beggars belief!’