Sin Eater: A Novel Read online

  Two peas in a peasecod.

  When I stole the bread, I told myself it was an honest crime. But what was honest about stealing?

  When my mother had my uncles destroy the family altar, I took Da’s side, telling myself how, had it been me, I would have stood by our beliefs. But somewhere buried in that memory is a girl secretly glad her mother’s choice spared them the purgers.

  And when I ate the deer hearts, I used my mother’s words, You’re nothing if you’re dead. I told myself I needed to be alive to help the Sin Eater, but, really, it was my life, dressed up as hers, that I was saving.

  Don’t I know by now that folk see their sins in the way they choose? There’s always a reason as to why selfishness is not really selfish and crimes are honest and waiting safely by while somefolk else is killed is really the more courageous choice. I’ve always had an answer for why I’m a goodly girl despite my sins. I thought I was an Owens. But mayhap I’ve always been a Daffrey.

  I say the words to finish Bessie’s Recitation. As I do, her arm that’s not working rolls onto its side. I don’t know if it’s the shake of her illness, but her fingers brush mine. I look long into her eyes, trying to know more, to see myself from her view, but there’s just her look, a little hard and a little soft all at the same time.

  Tom is sitting at the kitchen table when I come from Bessie’s room with the list of foods. Lee is turned towards the stove with a hand up to hide me from sight, but she’s peeking through her fingers. When I leave, my feet find the warp by the door one more time.

  I walk to the tumbledown cottage. It’s been years, but my feet know the way, like Greta in the fairy story, finding her way home. A dirty boy with tufted black hair and a half-moon cleft in his cheek plays with a stick in the yard. I stand long enough that he runs inside.

  My granddam steps out, shrivelled and shaking on a cane. ‘Never called for you,’ she says to the puddles. ‘Get on now.’ She makes the Maker’s sign across her chest and hips.

  I shake my hair and give a half smile, so she sees who I am. She hesitates. Steps from one foot to the other. ‘Never called for you,’ she says more quietly.

  ‘What’s this?’ I hear a man’s voice coming to the door. My uncle Misgett. His eyes narrow, then he sees the S and looks away. ‘My sister’s bastard come to mark us with Eve’s eye. Drive her off.’

  My cousin picks up the first stone, then my uncle. Then my granddam.

  I walk without direction along the middle of the road, letting folk make way or not, numb to the cries of cart men and bustling goodwives. I make turns with no reason, lost as to where to go.

  The lane I’m on widens into a little square I’ve never been to. It’s got a stone fountain in the centre for folk to collect water from. My face is flushed and hot, so I take a scoop. It tastes poorly, like metal. As I step back something catches my eye. It’s a marking on the fountain stone made in charcoal. Two straight lines with a wavy one between. Another witch’s mark.

  Am I followed by a witch? Is this why Bessie gave me such news? Why my own kin threw stones? Why I’m dogged by the worst fortune a folk could have?

  No, if I was cursed, it happened long before now. It began the day my mother bore me as a bastard. Her death, then Da’s, then becoming a sin eater. Really, I’ve been fully fugged my whole life.

  Two goodwives come chatting into the square with pails for water. One of them sees me dipping my hand into the fountain and pulls the other woman back the way they came.

  My first thought is that they saw the witch’s mark too. But of course that’s not it. It’s me. I’m what sent them running.

  I’m worse than a witch’s curse.

  A laugh comes up from my belly. Just like Bessie said, always at a poor moment. And then a thought comes. Say the mark on the fountain was a witch’s curse. What harm could it do me? Is there anything worse than what’s already been done? My laugh gets bigger. What have I left to fear? I ask the fountain.

  It can’t think of a thing.

  I scoop up a long drink of water direct from the pool, fouling it again with my touch, good and proper. It still tastes wretched. That makes me laugh even more. After despairing for so many days, the laughter feels so good.

  What if instead of fighting my nature, I gave in? I giggle at the foul water.

  It says back just two words: Join me.

  I strip off my shawl and my clothing. Goose pimples spread across my naked skin from shoulder to ankle. I step over the stone ledge, one leg and then the other, full into the fountain.

  There’s a certain comfort in rules. You know if you’re good or if you’re bad. And even if you’re bad, you know where you fit. You belong. But I don’t want other folk’s rules to say if I belong any more. I want to say for myself.

  I look round at the houses on the square and hear more than one shutter clap shut. Good, folk are watching and will spread the word of what they’ve seen.

  I sit down slowly in the water, feeling its cool go up my legs, over my thighs, into my cunny and bottom. I curse this fountain, I think to the square. I curse its water. I gaze from shuttered window to shuttered window. From this time forth, it will be known as the Sin Eater’s Fountain. None shall drink from it or wash in it or touch it again. Except me. Because I can’t be cursed. I am a curse.

  16. PICKLED CUCUMBER

  THE SHAME AND grief that were in my chest are gone. And I feel an odd thing. I feel just a little bit free. I shan’t be my father’s daughter any more. What has it got me? I will look to my mother, the proper tutor for a sinner. The proper tutor for a curse.

  A memory comes into my heart. One from a long time ago. We had gone to the market, my mother and me. Before buying anything, she had me pick up three rotten carrots that a vegetable vendor had thrown into a ditch because they couldn’t be sold. She told me to wipe them clean and hide them in my apron. Always be looking to your advantage, she said. Then, when she bought some carrots, she took three and had me switch them subtle-like with the rotten ones in my apron.

  ‘You’ve sold me rubbish, you cheat!’ she cried to the carrot vendor, loud enough that folk turned to see who was selling poor goods. He looked at the mouldy carrots and offered to replace them. Mother accepted, and we walked away, three new carrots in her hand, the three good ones she’d bought earlier still hidden in my apron.

  I remember Da was calm when I told him all about our clever trick. When he confronted my mother, she got rigid where Da was smooth. ‘They’re all cheats and swindlers. I cheat them before they do to me,’ she said.

  ‘Mayhap that’s why they cheat,’ Da said back.

  I never wanted to be like the Daffreys, but I certainly know how.

  I’m thirsty by the time I reach the tavern row in Northside, so I pull open the door to the worst-looking alehouse on the lane. It’s barely lit, with dark corners where nasty things can happen. The kind of place I imagine my Daffrey uncles might go.

  The alewife eyes me through the murk. When she sees me proper, she stands up straight. ‘Sissy?! Sissy?! It’s the sin eater come!’

  There’s the clatter of a pot in the kitchen, and a woman’s voice calls out, urgent, ‘What does she want? Give her what she wants!’

  ‘You do it!’ calls the alewife.

  ‘I surely will not!’ answers the kitchen voice.

  The alewife lifts a whole cask of ale from a low shelf and places it on the floor in front of me. ‘There we are,’ she says like I’m an unbroken horse she means to calm.

  ‘Has she gone?’ calls the kitchen voice.

  ‘Not yet!’ shrills the alewife.

  I just wanted a cupful, but a cask will do. I lift its weight and push open the door with my bum. There’s a hiss from one of the black corners of the alehouse. I hiss back.

  Paul and Frederick are asleep wrapped in their cloaks when I arrive home. Brida’s tucked into my rug in front of the hearth. In the corner is a stranger woman atop my mattress brought down from the loft.

  ‘Jane’s with
child,’ Brida says aloud in explanation.

  Again, I see. Beside the stranger is one sleeping babe. On her back is another, this one watching me with dark moon eyes. The firelight catches the stranger’s features. Hair smooth like a still pool. Skin light-coloured like bread taken from the oven too soon. Her babes look less like strangers, but still with some strange in them. Most likely a whore, this one. No doubt come to town for the Queen’s upcoming revels.

  I place the ale cask down by the ewer.

  ‘Jane’s from the other side of the world,’ Brida says with laboured brightness, mayhap to cover the awkwardness of having taken my mattress.

  ‘Rest yourself, Brida,’ says Jane, the sound of her words are as plain as if we grew up neighbours. The care in the words is also plain, though I see Jane keeps her distance.

  I go to Paul’s sleeping body and finger about his pockets. He starts up, waking Frederick too, but I’ve already pulled a thin blade from its leather sheath. Paul cries out and holds his hands to his face, but I’m back at the cask knocking out its keystone with the knife’s handle. Once tapped, I pour the ewer full of ale.

  Paul, Brida, Frederick, and Jane watch out of the sides of their eyes to see what I’ll do next. Jane’s children watch Jane. What I do is drink.

  What would my mother do in a moment like this? I ask myself.

  Get her mattress back.

  So I turn to it and stare. Jane, still on top of the mattress, stiffens under my look, but says nothing. I keep my gaze locked on the mattress. By and by, Jane begins to fidget.

  I am a curse, I think at her, then take another sip of ale.

  Her fidgeting grows to a discomfort, and before I’ve even drained the ewer, she moves herself off the mattress and onto the floor. In reply, I remove my gaze. The whole room softens. I take my mattress and go up the ladder to the loft.

  A straw pokes through the mattress into my back, and I scratch where it bites. As I do, I’m surprised to find flesh where there’s always been just skin on bone. I look for Ruth’s shape in the mattress to see if I’ve come closer to filling it, but there’s only my shape now.

  In the morning, my hearth is busy with a rare bubbling pot. The stranger woman, Jane, is making a pottage smelling of gurnards and onions. A smell that at one time would send me running for a bowl. Now, all I think on is tale bearing. My bones softened by a layer of fat; I leave the others to it.

  Jane’s children clamber over Frederick, lean limbs falling and rising like mill wheel spokes. They look a fair bit like him. Mayhap he’s their father. The older child swats the younger, and the younger bawls. The older returns a smattering of abuse in not quite formed words. Jane adds her scoldings on top, but when I walk to the ale cask, she quiets them. I feel two ways about my squatters. They’re a kind of company, filling the house with their pleasant chatter and a good, warm fug. But sometimes I fear they’d just as soon bury me in the garden and take the place for themselves. I swallow a mouthful of ale and look around. Brida and Paul sit quiet before the hearth, eyes averted. Frederick and the others are still. This morning they fall on the side of company.

  A fine spring day. What would my mother do on such a day?

  The market is just beginning to do custom when I arrive. There’s a man selling codling apples with a girl that looks to be his daughter. My real da was a rich man, I think. How did my mother ever meet him?

  In my head I see the Country Mouse with his pink nose from the day the Norman emissary arrived. Mayhap it was by the river that my parents met. My sire comes to town on a barge. My mother’s there along the banks collecting cockles. He calls to her, offers to buy her catch. She calls back that nothing she has is for sale, giving him a look that scolds.

  He reddens. ‘No, I never meant anything untoward.’

  The Country Mouse would say untoward, I think. My mother would offer up a handful of cockles for having an honest heart. He would ask if she would like to join him on his barge. The wharf is busy enough that she slips aboard without a nosy wherryman making hay about it, and she, no, I am alone on the barge with the Country Mouse. He wears the same slashed sleeves as the day I first saw him. He tells me how tedious he finds the ladies of the court, how they don’t know simple country-folk things like how to wash a wool blanket without turning it to felt.

  Then I tell him how court ladies bloody their short breeches just the same as country girls do, and he laughs. He has a cup of strong beer that we share, and I think how his lips are touching the same place as mine as we pass it back and forth. He looks at me, and I don’t feel nerves because it’s like he’s always known me. His eyes crease when he asks if we can’t just take the barge all the way past the town and on down the river until we find a wild place no folk knows about. We moor the barge by a green bank and play hide-and-catch in the long grasses. I run so quick he admires me for it. We part the branches of an old willow and find a shadowy little place where we can be ourselves alone.

  I’m drawn out of my dreaming by two boys minding a butcher’s stall nearby. The elder’s swinging a bull penis around trying to swat the younger with it. Who knows how my mother and sire met? For all I know he cornered her in an alley.

  Up ahead I spy the sweets man. He’s got all sorts of jars with delicacies in them. When I was little I’d imagine which I’d choose if ever I had the money. Sugar-paste flowers. Candied grapes. Pearled comfits. So many sorts, but I always wanted the same thing. Today, I go right up and stick my hand into the jar of orange suckets. I pull out a handful, the sugar on them gritty, like sand.

  ‘Hey now!’ the vendor calls out, then sees my sin eater collar. He turns to the other stall keepers around him. ‘Hey! Hey-o! What’s this?’ A man selling pickled vegetables shakes his head in startlement.

  The orange suckets taste nothing like sand. The sugar grit on the outside melts on my tongue so sweet my ears tingle inside like when you eat honey, but even more so. And the orange! It’s got a taste that’s tart, but sweet, like you ate a bright marigold.

  A stick of wood hits my forearm. The sweets man raises it up to strike me again. I slip behind a goodwife just as he lets it go, and it hits her in the belly. The goodwife cries out, and the sweets man curses. Then the pickle man yells for the constable, and I go off behind some other folk, a cackle coming out of my lips. It’s nerves, not pleasure, the laugh. I get out of the marketplace before the constable comes round. I can still feel the sweet of the suckets in my ears.

  And now I would like some shoes. Proper corked ones, so my feet don’t bruise with every stone on the road. I make my way to the lane where I found Paul begging. I recall it had a cordwainer’s shop on it.

  Inside, there’s a maid speaking with the master of the shop. ‘A pair in white leather. And if you give her cowskin for calf’s, you’ll not get a groat from my lady,’ the maid orders.

  A journeyman at work carving a heel block is the first to take notice of me. He drops his knife to the floor with a clatter. I’ll need to choose quick. I bustle past the maid to a shelf where they keep the finished shoes for delivery. I slip off my left shoe, since that foot’s the longer, and hold the shoe against the finished ones to compare lengths. There’s a beautiful pair of boots with upper leathers as soft as gloves, but they’re far too long. Made for a giant. There’s several velvet slippers, even a pair of a size with my own battered one, but the velvet would stain and tear on the walk back to Dungsbrook alone. The closest fit is a pair of black leather shoes with a rounded toe. They’ve a corked sole, just as I want, and a strap that buttons around the ankle. The woman they’ve been made for has a sturdier ankle than mine, but I pull them on nevertheless.

  I look up to find the journeyman still in his seat, his hand in the air where it let go of the knife. The master shoemaker is staring fixedly at a knob of thread wax on the workbench. The maid has fled. As I leave the shop she’s turning onto the lane with a giant of a man. Mayhap the one who ordered the great boots. She points the giant my way. I turn and hiss. The giant stops where
he is. I am a curse.

  I start to march off down the road, but I barely take a step before I fall. Corked shoes are nothing like flat slippers. The thick, raised soles mean I can’t feel the road at all. It’s like walking over a floorboard, but it’s strapped to your foot. I wobble, step to step, trying to find the balance of it. The thick leather of the heel chafes, and my toes bump into the front part of the shoe. I try not to be disappointed. These are the shoes important folk wear, I remind myself.

  What to do next? Where have I always wanted to go, but never dared? Once I would have said the castle or inside a rich merchant’s home, but I’ve been to those. I’ve been up and down stairs. I’ve sat at the front of a Makerhall. I’ve even been in a jail. Where haven’t I been? And then I think of a place.

  My shoes get easier to manage on the walk back through Northside. By the time I get to Dungsbrook, I’m nearly walking at my customary pace. As I pass the lane to the woad yard, I hear the call of a hawk from a nearby tree. When I look, I see only a smaller bird by a nest. It must be a cuckoo. They mimic hawks to scare brooding birds from their nests. Then the cuckoo rolls the mother’s eggs out and lays its own in the nest for the other bird to raise. Nasty birds, cuckoos.

  The Domus Conversorum looms above the road a few houses from mine. It’s the run-down dwelling where the old king made Jews live while they converted to the new faith. A place I’ve never been. I’ve never even seen any Jews. All I know about them are three things: they’re the chosen folk in the Maker’s book, they’re strangers, and that, kind of like fairies, there aren’t any left in Angland.

  A window gapes open and black like a toothless mouth on the ground floor. A collapsed chimney slumps on the dwelling’s roof, and, all over, sandy bricks crumble like cottage cheese. It’s as if Brida were a building, wasting away from the outside. Still, the building must have been fine once. Stone is for manor houses or Makerhalls. What a thing, to live in a stone house.

  The door has been repaired and repaired again and not with good wood. It pushes open with a touch, which bodes poorly. My uncle Misgett would say: lots of bars and bolts on a door is a sign that folk inside have got more to lose than you. That’s the place you go for the take. But when folk don’t bar their door, it means they have less to lose than you, and you’re the one who might get taken. I think on that for a good moment. Then I step inside. I have no lock on my door either.