Sin Eater: A Novel Read online

  ‘Miss Albers, the sin eater’s come,’ says the maid, as if the two of us weren’t standing there, filling up the room.

  The old body turns her neck and shoulders, all of a piece. ‘I never called her, Nellie.’ She’s got an accent like from a stranger country and talks in a sharp way that makes me cringe for her maid, Nellie, despite my earlier sour towards her.

  ‘You’re poorer and poorer with each day, Miss Albers,’ Nellie the maid says back.

  ‘It’s you wants to see me in the grave!’ her mistress spits with more venom than you’d think such an old body could muster.

  ‘Maker forgive you, Miss Albers, for saying such a thing, when I do nought but care for you!’ The maid makes the Maker’s sign across her shoulders and hips again.

  ‘I’ll none of your sham piety, Nellie.’

  Nellie whispers something under her breath before she goes. The Sin Eater stays where she stands.

  ‘Still here?’ the old body says. ‘Shame to waste your coming. On with it.’

  ‘The Unseen is now seen, the Unheard is heard,’ says the Sin Eater.

  ‘She thinks me a witch,’ the woman cuts in. ‘I’m old, and I enjoy reading in stranger tongues.’

  A good start for a witch, I think. Add to it the eight books . . .

  The woman goes on, ‘Nellie’s a ninny who hears a stranger tongue and thinks it a witch’s incantation. Sees no husband and conceives I must be wived to Eve.’ She pauses for coughing. ‘I keep to myself and won’t suffer fools, that’s the only pact I’ve made. My sins are thus: pride, miserliness, wrath, coveting my neighbour’s property, slandering my maid, trying to breed animals of different kinds together, intentionally letting a goose bite my maid.’ I look to the Sin Eater, but she nods along, as if the sins were no more peculiar than forgetting your prayers.

  Everyfolk knows the foods for the commoner sins just from living. Parents threaten ‘Don’t make me see herring on your coffin!’ for disobeying. Neighbours gossip about who’ll make the sin eater eat raisins. And of course there’s nursery rhymes:

  Jack and Jane went up the lane

  To fetch a pail of water,

  Jack fell in and couldn’t swim

  And Jane had a picnic after.

  What did she carry in the hamper

  To eat and save Jack’s soul?

  A herring, a pickle, a cracker with treacle

  And a spoonful of salt in a bowl.

  I used to spend hours with Lee parsing out the sins: Jack disobeys his father (herring) by going to the well. He’s prideful (salt) about getting near to the well. He’s lazy (pickle) in not learning to swim. We never agreed on what the cracker with treacle was, but Gracie Manners thought it was an old-fashioned way to say bread (the sin we’re born with). But breeding animals together and setting a goose on your maid? I have no inkling of the foods for them.

  All at once the old body’s finished her list. She looks us each hard in the eye, ‘Say your words to end it, sin eaters, but come back not on the morrow for my Eating, nor the day after that, for until Nellie calls the witch finder to prick me with a bodkin or see if I burn, I’ll be here, hale and hearty, sitting a piece in my chair.’

  Nellie shuffles us out with one more Maker’s sign across her body.

  We go on to two more Recitations and two more Eatings. The Sin Eater feeds me only the tiniest morsels of each food, and I manage not to puke.

  On our way back through the town square towards Northside and Dungsbrook, we find folk gathered for a newspanto. We stand in the front, where I’ve never been. Usually I’m hopping up and down behind some burly apprentice hoping for a look at the playacting newsboys, but the older Sin Eater pushes through, folk’s sharp words dying in their throats when they see it’s us.

  It’s a fair-sized crowd. Among them I notice three stranger men. I don’t know how exactly I can tell they’re strangers. Something about their clothes or the look on their faces says they’re not from here. Two of them carry what look like long lutes, as if they’re musicians. Before I can think on it more, one of the newsboys dances out in front of the crowd and announces a countess has been arrested for plotting against Queen Bethany. Behind him, the other boys act it out. One’s made up like the countess, lead paint rubbed into his cheeks to make them white like highborn ladies’. Another plays a guard.

  ‘Of what am I accused?’ cries the countess.

  ‘Sending spies to murder Queen Bethany and put her Eucharistian cousin on the throne instead,’ answers the guard.

  ‘Oh, Maker mine!’ says the countess. She pulls out a string of prayer beads and begins to pray. It’s a very daring bit of playacting, since prayer beads are from the old Eucharistian faith and were outlawed when Bethany became queen. But it’s also clever, I think, because it says the countess is Eucharistian without saying it aloud. Every folk knows the Eucharistians want Bethany dead and her Eucharistian cousin on the throne, or at least for Queen Bethany to name her cousin as her heir since she has no children of her own.

  One of the pantoboys with a fine voice begins a song:

  The Dame of Pikes,

  Brings her spies

  To take our ace of hearts.

  But her vile knaves

  Will never trump

  With their veiled arts.

  With clubs and tiles,

  We’ll seek these spies

  And chop them into parts.

  On their coffins

  Will be et beefsteak,

  As well as cock brain tarts

  The song sounds like it’s about playing cards, but I think the dame of pikes is meant to be the countess and the ace of hearts Queen Bethany. Beefsteak is et for treason and cock brain tart must be for spying, though I’m not sure. It gives me shivers to think there might be spies hidden in town. I look for the three stranger musicians I saw in the crowd, but they’ve gone.

  The panto ends with the guard pushing the countess off as if towards the dungeon under Queen Bethany’s castle. Folk clap, but there’s a mutter here and there too. Queen Bethany’s hard as bone with rivals. They don’t live long.

  ‘Tempered choleric, like a man,’ I hear a folk say.

  ‘Unnatural,’ inkles another.

  Just then a different newsboy comes out dressed like Queen Bethany herself. His crown has paste jewels and trailing after him are four little boys, baby fat still cupping their chins. The boys are all made up as the Queen’s suitors. Three are meant to be Anglish lords bearing their little coats of arms. One has a stag on white, another a blue boar, and the third, a golden ship. The fourth boy’s dressed as the Norman prince, who’s Eucharistian and a stranger but would become an ally through marriage. There’s hissing from the crowd as he goes by.

  A man nearby spits in the dirt. ‘Heathen prince would make us all into Eucharistians.’

  ‘Dirty Normans,’ says a goodwife. ‘Their women are whores.’

  Before the crowd gets too rowdy, a final boy comes out. He’s a sweetie barely past toddling, with a quill in his plump, little hand – the Queen’s secretary, who folk all say is her favourite at court. He’s an Anglishman, new faith, and of good family, which calms everyfolk. This is when the bigger newsboys swing through the crowd with their hats in their hands for coins. There’s no news, this part of the show’s just to make us all cluck and coo over the sweet babes and dig into our aprons for a penny. Not that I have any to give.

  The sun’s set, and I think we’re done for the day, but the Sin Eater takes us to one last Eating. It’s for the new mother who did incest by marrying her husband’s brother. When we arrive, we find a second Eating’s been laid out too. Just one roll of fresh bread atop the smallest of pine boxes for her babe. It’s expected for babies to pass, still it catches my breath to see the little roll. Then my belly rumbles. Shame spreads warm and sticky into my heart. I pray to the Maker that the folk come to witness didn’t hear the rumble.

  We eat the baby’s bread, for the sin that we’re born with, Eve’s original trespass,
along with the sins of the mother. I eat slowly.

  I will not puke, I tell the coffins. Not just to do the Eating right for the mother and her babe, but because I need food that sticks.

  In the evening we pass the jug between us before the fire. When it burns low, she points to a door out to the garden, where I find a small pile of firewood neatly stacked.

  As I kneel before the hearth with an armful of wood, a thick, black spider scuttles out and over my hand. I shriek before I know it. I catch a motion from the side of my eye and brace myself for a cuff from the Sin Eater, but it’s the spider she’s after with her heel. She grinds it into the floorboards. Later, after the fire has gone cold, I feel her cradle around me again. It feels good.

  See, it’s not the worst of the worst, I tell the deadness still lodged in my heart. I have a roof over my head. A fire to keep me warm.

  And us. Against the grief and the loneliness and the sins heaped upon our souls, I remind myself, we have us.

  Even though I’m not crying, she shushes me softly. Mayhap it’s more for her than me.

  4. POMEGRANATE

  DAYS JOIN TOGETHER into weeks. Early spring becomes late spring. The Sin Eater’s nothing like my mother. The Sin Eater is silent and steady and ready with a slap if I, say, sleep past dawn or don’t do the words right at the end of a Recitation. But when she holds me sometimes at night, it feels like I belong. Her house becomes our house. Our house becomes home. Me on my rug by the hearth. Her in the loft I’ve still never ventured into. She’s not my kin, and I’m not hers, but we’re something to each other. We are us.

  Light comes through the edges of the shutters, and there’s a sloshing sound. She’s gulping down water. I roll away from the sound, sorting dream from waking. She’s on to tying back her hair, readying to leave.

  I sit up. I should comb my hair, I think, suddenly sure that this is what should happen. But then she pulls open the door, and I’m running after, my unkempt black hair bobbing along with me.

  I pat it down as the boys call out today’s Eatings and Recitations. I’m accustomed to at least a splash of water on my face, some marker between day and night. But in this new world there’s scarcely any.

  One of the messengers, I notice, is not a boy at all but a proper servant wearing the Queen’s badge, a falcon and a rose.

  My own mother knew all the royal heraldry even though the old king had six wives. She’d draw the queens’ badges over and over in our hearth cinders until they stuck in my mind too. A crowned swan for his first wife, the mother of Queen Maris. A crowned falcon for his second, who was Queen Bethany’s mother and killed for treason, fornication, incest, and witchcraft. A phoenix for his third wife, who died in childbirth. This one was my mother’s favourite because the phoenix, she said, rose from cinders to greatness. After that was a plain golden badge for the fourth wife, a plain crown for his fifth, and, finally, a maiden rising from a rose for his last wife, Queen Katryna. She lived longer than the king and was Queen Bethany’s stepmother, raising her up in her own household.

  I’m brought back by the older Sin Eater starting off down the lane. The boys have finished their messages, and I heard not a one.

  The Queen’s messenger accompanies us at a distance, so we must be going to the castle. I’ve never been inside the castle, only seen it from a distance. I have to take two steps for every one of the older Sin Eater’s. I keep my eye on her skirts swaying across her jiggy-joggy buttocks so I don’t lose her on the busy morning roads. As we approach the queue at the castle gate, the carts and carriages slow. I can see the stoppage ahead: a young farmer driving cattle across the road.

  ‘Get out of the way!’ cries a cart man.

  ‘Got the same right as you,’ the farmer calls back, trying to move his cows along. He sounds uncertain. Mayhap it’s his first time to town.

  ‘Slaughterhouse’s in Dungsbrook, back behind you,’ the cart man tells him, and not kindly. ‘Follow the stink if you can smell it above your own.’

  ‘Going to the bull, not the slaughterhouse,’ says the farmer, nodding to his cattle.

  ‘Heifers, are they? Young’uns going to meet the bull?’ says the cart man with a lewd nod like they’re young ladies.

  The older Sin Eater doesn’t wait to hear the end of their talk. She pushes right past the farmer and his heifers. Then she goes up the side of the queue, cutting in front of all the folk waiting to enter the castle. A salt man is just stepping up to the guards when she makes it to the front. He swallows his surprise and moves aside. Even the castle guards turn away when we go in. I have never felt so important.

  The messenger leads us through a courtyard to the castle’s heart. Just the heart is bigger even than the great Makerhall in the centre of town. We go to a heavy, wooden door with carved stone above it made to look like a scroll. I want to touch it because it curves almost like water, but the Sin Eater doesn’t stop, and it’s too high to reach anyway.

  Inside is a passageway lined with doors. I try to imagine what might be behind each – kitchen, scullery, larder, buttery, storeroom, servants’ chamber . . . The messenger leads us to a set of stairs. I give a small prayer for protection going up. On the next level, there are even more doors – linen closet, herb dispensary, silver room . . . My mind falls short of imagining what could be inside. Then we go up yet another set of stairs. We’re higher in the air than I have ever been. We must be as high as starlings fly. My head feels light, but I still wish there were a window for me to see out of.

  How does the town look from a starling’s range? I ask the terrifying stairs. Could I see my old house?

  I get my wish soon enough. We pass a slit window in the stone. All I see is east out of the castle: pasture and farmland. Still, the houses look like miniatures and the sheep! As small as ants. The older Sin Eater pulls me by the collar. I think I hear a stitch tear.

  A great ham of a woman awaits us in a doorway. She seems to be a woman, though she is so painted she could well be a picture. Her face has been covered in white paint. Her eyebrows are drawn into narrow arches. Each cheek is marked with an oval of red, and her lips are painted into a small bow. Across her bosom is the same white as her face but with blue veins painted on top. Only a nervousness that makes her mouth pucker and tremble shows she’s a breathing lady and not canvas. I can tell she’s rich beyond rich because her enormous skirt’s embroidered with jewels. Then I notice her stomacher. Tawny orange like her skirt and hemmed with cloth of silver. The only folk allowed to wear cloth of silver are the ladies of the Queen’s bedchamber. There’s rules about it.

  This Painted Pig has to sidestep out of the doorway while we pass because she and the Sin Eater are both so plump. She’s surprised to see a second sin eater, I can tell, but I wear the S, so there’s nothing for it. The Painted Pig leaves us and takes the news of our arrival through an inner door flanked by guards.

  We come into a sort of presence or sitting room. At least that’s what most of the ladies are doing. They must be the ladies-in-waiting or privy ladies. I know there’s many levels, but not all the names for them. There’s chambermaids and washerwomen at the bottom. There’s the Queen’s bedchamber ladies at the top. And then there’s all the other ladies in between. Gracie Manners’s sister, who worked as a chambermaid, said Queen Bethany even keeps a few daughters of old Eucharistian families like hostages among her ladies. That way, if any of the families try for a rebellion, she’s got heads to cut off. Except for them, it seems a great advantage to wait on the Queen. When there’s a position that opens up, it’s like a fair in front of the castle, highborn folk all coming to squeeze in a daughter or sister or wife with the Queen’s ladies.

  We wait. The rushes under my feet have been trod down, and the stones are hard through my slippers. I shift from foot to foot, the ache building in each sole until I find myself looking hungrily at the cushions two young ladies of an age with me – one pretty, one plain – sit atop nearby. Even with the cushions both sit like they’ve sticks up their bac
ksides. I swallow a little laugh at the thought.

  The fair one is dressed almost as well as the Painted Pig, but with an open partlet up top, showing some of her bosom. She’s truly beautiful and has thick gold hair like in songs about pretty girls. Her sleeves, I notice, are of a new fashion, brought in at the wrist instead of open.

  ‘Have you an extra candle for me?’ the fair lady asks the plain one. The plain one’s face is the kind that’s hard to remember, like there’s nothing there to notice. A face like a bowl of mush. Her dress is dark, simple wool, and her sleeves are wide like mine. From the way she holds her arms down, she’s trying to keep attention from them.

  ‘Haven’t you any candles of your own?’ Mush Face asks back. ‘I saw a whole sconce in your chamber not two days ago.’

  Fair Hair smooths her partlet awkwardly.

  ‘How now?’ snorts Mush Face. ‘Have you used them all?’

  Fair Hair doesn’t answer.

  ‘Then you’ve either taken up books or a lover.’

  Fair Hair tries to hide it, but her eyes say Mush Face got one of her guesses right.

  I shift again from foot to foot. Fair Hair looks up at me, then hastily at a tapestry. It’s got a picture of a naked lady in a wood under a full moon on it. It’s different from the naked-lady pictures my Daffrey uncles paid a printer to ink up and sell on market days. On the tapestry, tree branches cover all the naughty bits. Also, one of the naked lady’s hands is on a trunk of a tree that has a winged fairy coming out of a flower in it. The naked lady’s other hand’s on her belly like she’s got the guts gripes. That’s what my mother called it when your belly gets sore and cramped from too much yellow bile or worms. In the weaving there’s not all the details of a true woman, like the belly’s all one smooth plain, and the toes are all the same length. At the foot of the naked woman are fierce creatures like you’d never want near in real life: a yellow lion, a big stag, and a blue boar. They’re all at her feet like dogs.