Sin Eater: A Novel Read online

  ‘Don’t we all when the stars augur what we wish to hear,’ the Willow Tree says. ‘But a virgin queen was foretold by many, ancients too.’

  ‘A virgin queen who will usher in a lasting era of peace through the new faith.’ The dying man nods. He looks up. ‘Have you found the witch who made the poppet?’

  ‘Do not fear, the Queen shall be protected,’ answers the Willow Tree.

  ‘You will protect her with a spell?’ The dying man winces and farts again. ‘The scryer promised me protection as well. He gave me a parchment with strange symbols upon it.’ He reaches shakily into his robe and removes a folded paper.

  The Willow Tree opens it and brings it near his face. ‘These symbols are part of the language given to Adam by the angels. The language that spawned Hebrew and Greek. The symbols are imbued with divine power. If they have not protected you, it is you who are at fault, an unworthy vessel. Have you undertaken unworthy acts?’ the Willow Tree asks. ‘Did you pursue alchemy for gold?’

  ‘Gold is a physical manifestation of the Maker’s purity, a noble metal,’ says the dying man.

  ‘Again, you interpret what you desire, not what the ancients wrote. Did you offer a tribute to the Maker? Gold, perhaps?’ says the Willow Tree like he knows the dying man’s thoughts. ‘A tribute must be of a kind. If you wish for life, you must offer life.’

  The dying man startles. ‘Your arms could be torn off, and worse, for uttering such witchcraft.’

  ‘Your arms could be torn off, and worse, for trying to make gold,’ the Willow Tree says back. ‘My practice is rooted in mathematics, astrology, and the study of philosophers. It is an ancient art, and its mysteries have served the greatest kings and queens. It is categorically different from dark arts performed by ignorant women.’

  The dying man says quietly, ‘It is now you who interprets what you desire.’

  The Willow Tree turns to leave. There’s a flicker of gold at his chest like a fat slice of pie with a symbol in the centre. The symbol’s the same one Mush Face was looking at in her book the day I went to Tilly Howe’s Recitation.

  ‘Am I to die today?’ the dying man calls out.

  The Willow Tree doesn’t stop. ‘We are all called to the Maker.’

  ‘Have you nothing that might prolong my life?’ says the man.

  The Willow Tree sees me through the crack of the door. ‘Perhaps it is time to think on your afterlife, sir.’

  Up close, I see the dying man is sorely frightened to die. I feel sorry for him, so I say the words to begin kindly.

  He’s ready with his sins. ‘Putting learning before the Maker, putting profit before the Maker, making a birth chart, the use of symbols to increase wealth and protect against ill.’ His hand still clutches the parchment with the symbols on it.

  I nod to the paper.

  He looks at me sharp, then softens like an egg tart. ‘Yes. Yes. Idolatry.’ He goes on. ‘And the common sins. Arrogance, parsimony, envy, greed. Tell me’ – his eyes search mine – ’have you ever spoken with an angel? Is it the archangel Michael who shall balance my soul against a dove’s feather?’

  I don’t know. I don’t know at all what happens after we pass on, except what I was always told by the Makermen: if I was good, I would join the Maker in the sky. And now that I have every folk’s sins heaped on me, I’ll be Eve’s handmaiden. Unless I obey the Maker’s will in my every act, which I’m not sure I can do. And now this man’s sins are getting heaped on me too. When I think on it, it makes me less sorry for him. Why should he be frightened when I’m taking up all his sins?

  When I say the last bit to finish the Recitation, I don’t say it kindly at all.

  After my work, the road back towards Northside’s oddly empty. Then I hear drums. Somefolk important has arrived in town. I hear trumpets too. It must be the emissary from the Norman prince, here to propose marriage to Queen Bethany. The one the great revels will celebrate.

  I turn off the main road and head to the river, where folk will be gathering to see the emissary’s barge. As I get nearer, the road begins to fill up. It gets fuller and fuller until I’m wending my way through a crowd, trying not to feel hurt when folk recoil at seeing me. I get myself a good view for the procession.

  All the court has turned out. They’ve got good views too, on either side of the road down to the wharf. Across from me, a band of musicians wearing the Queen’s badge sit atop a trestle. It’s only after a good gawk that I recall I’ve seen some of them before. They’re the strangers I spied at a newspanto. They play the same long lutes they carried then, but also flutes and viols. One man, young, dark-haired and taut-built, plays an instrument I’ve never seen. It’s as big as a man and has brown curves like a horse’s haunch. He bows it like a viol, but standing up. When he plays, its sound rumbles through my chest.

  The highborn folk lining the road around the musicians all wear red and purple, silver and gold, not plain, woad-dyed blue like the rest of us. Behind them, grooms and maids try to keep costly hems out of the dirt and hold burning herbs to counter the stink from the river.

  I look among the highborn. Finally I find him. The Country Mouse’s nose is pink with sun, and he’s wearing a big ruff. His badge, I see, is a stag.

  Next to him are two men who must be brothers, they look so alike. They’re familiar, but I don’t know from where. Mayhap my mother or I washed their laundry. One of the brothers says something, and the Country Mouse makes the nodding sort of face you do when you don’t know what to say. It makes me laugh a little.

  Another trumpet sounds, which must mean something’s happening. Then a small man rides past on a tall horse. From the way everyfolk stares, this must be the emissary. The big horse makes him seem no more than a child. Near me, folk snicker and some even spit.

  I look back to the Country Mouse. He’s saying something to his groom. If I were the groom I could tell the Country Mouse my noticings, like that the emissary looks like a child. And that our country seems so big and our queen so mighty, but how little our country must be if the Norman prince can send a messenger to propose marriage. The Country Mouse would find me clever for saying this. A clever friend to help him sort his thoughts. He’d invite me for a walk along the river. Not the awful part in Dungsbrook, but the fine part, upstream. He’d say, Why should either of us be lonely when we can pass the time together?

  One of the brothers next to the Country Mouse pulls out a small silver box. It catches the sunlight like the Country Mouse’s ring did in the castle garden. The man opens the box, pulls something out with two fingers, and then, as if it were a perfectly usual thing to do, sniffs it up his nose. I’ve never seen the like. He offers the box to his brother and the Country Mouse. I look harder at the brothers.

  All at once, I know them. Or one of them at least. And not because I did his laundry. It’s the recorder, the man who sentenced me to be a sin eater. The one who was married to Ruth and made her a sin eater too. My neck burns hot, and even with the Country Mouse there and all, I don’t have a mind to watch any more.

  I turn down a small lane back towards home, but I’m stuck in a second crowd, clinging like a leech to the first one. It’s a beggar crowd. The beggars all wait on the small lanes so folk must walk by them on their way to and from the procession. There’s lame beggars, old beggars, beggars with babies wrapped round their middles, and poorer sorts of actors and jugglers. They all wear passports with the seal of the Queen’s office on their rags that say they’re deserving poor, permitted to beg by the Queen’s mercy.

  Not far down the lane I discover Paul. He’s leaning against the front of a cordwainer’s shop shaking a little wooden bowl I recognize from my home. He holds the bowl out to two guildsmen, one large, one small, who have stopped to buy a pie at a cart. Brida’s nowhere to be seen.

  Out in the daylight, Paul’s face is a horror. His cheeks are stricken with white lumps like his skin blistered and then got stuck that way. He has no scarf today, the better to stir folk’s pity. Under his
scars, his jaw is strong and his nose straight. He might have been handsome once.

  I notice his passport is pinned to his rags, but where other passports have a seal in a circle that’s regular and well-inked, Paul’s passport has no circle and the figure is muddled. Circles are very hard to counterfeit. I learned that from my Daffrey uncles. Misgett Daffrey, my elder uncle, had an old sailor who worked as a jarkman counterfeiting begging passports. The sailor was accustomed to carving scrimshaw in bone. When he sold a false passport the seal was sound.

  Why wouldn’t Paul have a legitimate passport to beg, given his dreadful scars? Mayhap he didn’t have chummage to bribe the Queen’s office. Mayhap he was deemed corrupt for some reason or other.

  If he sees me, Paul gives no sign. I walk past as if we are strangers, not homefellows.

  Beyond Paul is a trio of scrawny actors preparing a panto. One of them barks to draw attention, promising a play called The Queen’s Verity. I stop to watch.

  ‘Maker save us from bad actors,’ I hear Paul mutter.

  One actor steps out to begin the show. It’s the old Queen Maris he’s dressed as. He swoons, complaining of the heat because he, Queen Maris, is with child. He pulls out prayer beads from the old faith and kisses them, praying to the Maker to protect the heir in his belly.

  Two boys come on next dressed as Queen Bethany and the Queen’s physician, the Willow Tree. They fawn over Queen Maris but then turn and begin to chant a witch’s spell.

  What comes next should be at a butcher’s shop, never a panto. ‘Where’s the sacrifice?’ calls the Queen Bethany actor.

  The Willow Tree actor holds up a real pigeon, flapping in his hand. He cuts its throat and blood splatters all over their costumes. The pregnant Queen Maris grabs her belly and screams, ‘Maker save me; these witches have killed my baby!’

  Maker mine. I swallow. The guildsmen eating their pies are less calm. ‘Call the constable!’ the larger one urges the smaller. The boy playing Bethany sings a gleeful song:

  Mistress Maris,

  Angland’s heiress,

  How has your garden grown?

  I’ve stolen the bloom

  From out of your womb

  And now I can take the throne!

  The larger guildsman marches his well-fed bones to the singing actor and strikes him across the face. ‘Foul-mouthed pig!’

  Soon after, the constable barrels down the lane led by the smaller guildsman, and the actors break off their mummery to make a run for it. The constable catches one of the actors by the ear. Two strikes with his club and the boy is squealing, ‘We were offered six shillings!’

  ‘What’s this?’ asks the constable. It’s more than a washerwoman makes in a season.

  ‘To make a play that the Queen killed her sister Maris’s babes by black magic—’ The back of the constable’s hand whacks the boy’s mouth.

  ‘Six shillings,’ the boy says again as if the amount makes it less wrong.

  ‘Who gave it to you?’ asks the constable.

  The answer is what you’d expect. ‘Don’t know.’

  ‘Well, then it’s the press for you, isn’t it?’ says the constable.

  The press. The crowd of folk suddenly feels too close around me. I push hard against a goodwife to make way. She cries out but gets quiet again when she sees who I am. A friend pulls her out of my way with a low hiss. The hiss rankles. I lunge at the friend and give her a good hard shove too. She stumbles with a scream into a sweets vendor, smacking her head against his cart.

  ‘Maker save us!’ cries another woman. I turn back to the crowd. They’ve opened wide around me, their faces turned away. All of a sudden I want to run at them, make them all shriek and squeal. But it’s not them who’re nettling me. Not truly. It’s the picture I see inside my head of Ruth the Sin Eater under the stones of the press.

  I lurch to the side as if I might slip away from the picture. My head’s hot and my chest aches. I walk faster as if to outpace my thoughts, but the picture dogs me down the street.

  Ruth crushed. Ruth bleeding.

  Soon I’m running, urging the picture to leave me alone.

  Ruth, Ruth dying, the picture calls after me. Bessie dying, Ruth—

  It takes a moment for me to catch what’s happened. Bessie’s name, fallen in with Ruth’s. And suddenly the boy catches up with me, calling out his message. And like the sun’s last light disappearing over the fields, quicker than you ever think it will, the picture of Ruth’s death leaves my thoughts completely because the messenger’s calling out my old neighbour’s name.

  Bessie’s dying.

  15. GRAPES

  THE SMELL OF Bessie’s house is so familiar, it’s like I never went away. Broth smell from the pot always on the hearth. The mild, milky smell of Lee. The sharp tang of Tom.

  ‘It’s May,’ Lee says when I come in the door. Her hand fiddles with the knot holding up her apron. She does it when she’s nervous.

  Through the leather bottom of my shoe, my right toes find the warp just inside the door. It’s where a leak in the roof dripped rain until the board itself rose up.

  ‘Well, she knows the way, doesn’t she,’ Tom says in his quick way. His hand goes out in habit to pat against my shoulder as he always did, but his fingers lift just before they touch me.

  Bessie’s in her bed, tucked up in the old blue-and-brown quilt Lee and I played fairies under. Her smell is strong here, the clean, old-body smell of hay with a little bit of must on the edge. Her right hand shakes without stop and one side of her face seems slack, like it’s gone to sleep without the rest of her. But her hair is braided as it always was, combed smooth with a little grease. And there’s her jaw, too broad to ever be pretty. It’s all so familiar that a little knot like a plum stone lodges in my heart, and all of a sudden I want to cry.

  ‘Clouds coming, are they?’ Bessie says out of the side of her mouth. It’s what she always said when Lee or Tom or I had a tumble or a trip. She’d say it right in that little breath before the wailing started. When she says it now, the stone in my heart rolls over, and I want to crawl up inside the quilt against her warm, familiar body, and never leave. The tears stream out of my eyes.

  ‘Now, it’s me meant to be crying, I should think.’ Her words are slurred, but I hear them. And my tears won’t stop; I know that. Whatever seeing her has opened up has a long way to go before it’s emptied. I come to the edge of the bed and sit. Bessie looks at me, squinting in hard judgement with her right eye. ‘You’ve put some size on you,’ she assays. ‘So you’re managing.’

  I shake my head through the tears. I’m not managing. I’m not.

  But Bessie just looks back harder. ‘You are, with your mother’s blood in you.’

  No, not her. Never a Daffrey. I am an Owens.

  Bessie sighs back on the bed. ‘I had hoped to last a little longer. At least long enough to witness the Queen’s revels. It’ll be the talk of the age. My da fought the Normans in the last war. Oh, but I would have liked to spit on a Norman.’ One corner of Bessie’s mouth pinches into a smile. Her eyes flick over to me. ‘Well, let’s get on with it.’

  I stutter through the words to start the Recitation. ‘I haven’t much to recite,’ she begins. ‘I’ve been a poor-tempered, miserly sort. Quarrelled near enough to take me to Eve’s side. But I’m a good woman. Was good to my first husband, though he gave me no children.’ Her right hand is like a moth, hovering and trembling above the blanket. ‘And I was good to my second husband and our two babes, though Lee has the wit of a wood post, and many a day I’d like to trade Tom for a good milk cow.’ Bessie’s one working eye comes to rest on the far wall. ‘Wish I had spoke more of my mind. Went into marriage with my first husband as green as grass. You’ve likely not been with a man, unless you went to whoring after your da passed.’

  I gasp at the bluntness of it. Her eye weaves over to me.

  ‘Thought not. You’re a scrapping sort. So you won’t know there’s many men don’t know which end’s up on a wo
man. The first time, my first husband nearly stuck his prick in my arse. He had no idea there was two holes, and I was too timid to tell him.’

  A laugh burbles up through my tears.

  Bessie clucks. ‘Always a laugh at a poor moment, you.’

  I try to suck the laugh back in. But then she’s laughing too, out of the side of her face. My tears keep coming down. They are mixed with laughing at her story, but also at the thought of where we’ve both come to.

  Bessie shakes her head awkwardly. ‘Wish I had done more of what I wanted and less of what’s right. Might have more delicious bits to recite.’ I’m startled into a hiccup. ‘Oh, now, you’re not still as starched up as you once were, are you?’ Bessie says. ‘With how you came into the world and what you’ve seen lately you should know, the more you live, the more the sinner and the sinless can’t be pulled apart. All of us just getting by.’

  How I came into the world? My face shows my muddlement.

  ‘You must know by now your da wasn’t your true da. Your mother had a man before. Supposed to be highborn, your sire. Rich. Your mother’s folk, the Daffreys, went after him, as I recall. Tried to get coin to keep quiet about you.’ She looks me over with her one eye. ‘Oh, now, it surely can’t come as a surprise. You’re the very fruit of your mother’s tree. Two of you, like peas in a peasecod.’

  The picture comes. An old picture, faded from years deep in the corner of my heart, of a coffin lid in my very own house. Salt for pride. Mustard seed for white lies. Barley for curses. Crow’s meat with plum. A loaf shaped like a bobbin. And ruby-red grapes.

  Fresh grapes, for bearing a bastard.

  It was right there in my heart all these years, but I never wanted to see it. And now my heart feels like it’s coming unknit, like a thread’s pulling out all the stitches. I’m a lie.