Sin Eater: A Novel Page 8

  If I live, Maker mine, I pray, I will do my duty. I vow never to speak again outside the Recitations and the Eatings. I will obey.

  I venture a small breath. I look down to see black blood soaking through the woad blue of my shawl. There is only one way I’ll live. I need to find a healer.

  The courtyard is shadowed by evening when I stumble out of the scroll door. There’s a spike of cold where the shawl is wet with blood. A giggle comes out of my mouth, there’s so much blood. I make my way to the gate. Mayhap I’m swaying. I can’t rightly tell.

  I’ve only ever gone to a cunning woman for healing and only for household ailments: warts, charms, constipation. I’ve no notion where to go. In my mind I see black robes. Curiosities in windows. Apothecary lane.

  I make it to Northside, passing the whores and taverns. The apothecary shops are just shuttering. I’m very tired, and when I shift my shawl, there’s no more dry to staunch the wet. I step into the path of a man in apothecary robes with a small, curled beard. I raise my hand for help.

  He rears back like a horse, hands crossing himself, and goes around me. Like a drunkard I turn in slow steps after him, but he’s too quick. Across the lane, another robed man stops to gape. I raise my hand to him. He hisses as if across a great distance, and the ground moves under me like water under a river wherry. By now folk have gathered in a wide circle around me. No, an egg. An egg is the shape they’ve made. It seems suddenly important that the shape they’ve made is an egg and not a circle. And none in the egg will help.

  The ground moves again, this time in a sudden jolt. I feel a smack against my temple. I lick my lips and taste cold earth. There’s a white mist rising from my lips. Mayhap it’s my soul fleeing my body. My soul melting away into the air. Why doesn’t it take me with it? I try to go after my soul, but my legs don’t answer when I call on them to move. I am the sow who was cut open by the pig man. I shall be butchered and strung up in the marketplace. I see faces dimly in the distance. And then the mist comes and swallows me whole.

  7. PIG’S HEART

  ‘STILL WARM.’ A dream voice hardens into waking life. It’s night. Deep night. My shoes are gone, and somefolk’s digging in my sleeve. I shudder.

  Two figures jerk back above me. Vagabonds. Two women. No, a man and a woman. I’m still on the apothecary lane. I must have fallen.

  ‘We’re mere beggars, not rogues,’ the man says with a Northern accent. ‘We would never have molested your person had we known you remained among the living.’ His face is clotted with earth or clay, and his speech is fancy like an actor’s. I lift a hand to my neck. My shawl is stuck about my neck in a wet lump.

  ‘If you have a penny . . .’ says the woman. She’s curled in on herself under a blanket. ‘We’ve not et since a week past.’

  I dig under the shawl to feel my wound, but my fingers find metal, hard and cold. It takes a moment to remember it’s the brass sin eater collar. My thumb catches on something along it. A nick or a notch, not far from where Black Fingers’s knife dug in. My collar stopped his knife. Or hindered it. A laugh starts, but what comes out is a sort of gasp and choke.

  ‘Oh, look now. She’s cut, Paul. Badly at the neck,’ says the woman.

  ‘Shall we wait for her to die?’

  ‘Never such a soul as you,’ scolds the woman. She must not have seen the collar yet, covered as it is by the bloodied shawl. She comes closer. I try to pull back, but my body won’t obey. ‘Now, now,’ the woman shushes. ‘Would you rather I do as Paul suggests and play at bone dice until you pass?’ She has a smell about her. It takes a moment to name what it is. Rotting meat.

  She tugs at the shawl, but it’s my flesh that’s pulled up as if cloth and skin are stuck. ‘Not so big, but deep. A stitch or three might do.’ Her fingers don’t find the collar. ‘Have you a home, dearie? Paul’s a knack with a needle if you’ve a hearth fire for two honest beggars.’

  Honest beggars. One thing you can’t trust about beggars and vagabonds is that they’re honest. They’ve no kin and no home. No folk can speak for them. They could be thieves, murderers, heretics . . . but what choice do I have?

  Once they know I’m a sin eater I figure they’ll surely desert me, so I’ll get what I can before they do. It’s not lying, just not telling. My arm is heavy as stone as I raise it up. But raise it I do, and point the way to Dungsbrook.

  The man, Paul, carries me. He’s younger than his rags suggest, and strong. There’s something about his face I can’t quite figure in the dark. Like clotted cheese stuck in his beard. They both go about silently, and we stop once in a doorway as a warm lamp and its constable sway past.

  I point the way at each turn till I can tell by the smell we’ve reached Dungsbrook. As we get close, I’m a girl again in Da’s arms, letting my full weight rest against his warmth, feeling the bounce of his step. I want to fall fast asleep here in this moment, safe in these arms.

  ‘Where now, dearie?’ comes the woman’s voice. We’re a stone’s throw from the Sin Eater’s house. Perhaps I can crawl there. ‘Where, dearie?’ she asks again. They’ll flee from me when I show them, but there’s nothing for it. I raise my finger and point. The woman starts like a horse.

  ‘Oh, Maker mine,’ says Paul. He half drops, half places me down. I can see him wrong way round above me. ‘Did I touch her skin? I surely did. I surely did!’

  ‘Are you sure she’s a . . .’ asks the woman.

  The man’s fingers feel about my neck. He jerks back when he finds the collar.

  ‘Does your flesh burn, lovey?’ calls the woman.

  ‘She was light as a child,’ is all Paul says. I can’t fathom why they haven’t yet fled.

  ‘Mayhap new to it. Hasn’t had time to fatten,’ the woman says back. ‘Can you get her inside?’

  ‘While avoiding touch and direct gaze?’ Paul asks.

  ‘Lodging for the night out of the cold,’ says the woman. ‘And no constable chasing us down.’

  ‘What have we come to?’ Paul grabs hold of my skirt and drags me in the door without touching my flesh.

  Just before the door shuts, a piece of moonshine falls across Paul and the woman. And suddenly I know why they dare come in with me. What looked to be clotted cheese in Paul’s beard are pocks and patches of grey, hardened skin on his face, as if he was burned, but a little different. And the woman. Her rags have fallen open. Inside is but half a body. A shoulder caved and drooping, a rib cage with an unnatural cant, a cropped and misshapen arm. These are not just vagabonds. They are the unseen too.

  I’m stuck like a beetle on my back, too weak to turn myself. Paul’s left me just inside the door and is now building up the hearth fire. The woman, called Brida, I learn, settles down on the Sin Eater’s stool. As the flickers of firelight grow I see fully what she is. A leper.

  There’s old stories about lepers, of how they banged clappers when they walked through town to warn folk of their coming. How they were forbidden from using the well for fear of contagion. How, like a sin eater, none looked upon them lest they be cursed. But I must have heaped lepers in with goblins and hog boons and other fables because, seeing Brida before me, I can’t countenance she’s real.

  ‘Don’t fear, lovey,’ she says to the ceiling as if she knows my thoughts. ‘The sickness doesn’t pass so easy as that. Paul, here, hasn’t caught it, not in a handful of years. We won’t share food and drink or sleep close, and you’ll be right as rain.’

  A corpse she is, rotted and caved at the edges. Her nose is a stub and on one side where there should be the square of a shoulder there’s a bowl-shaped hollow. One arm comes to its natural end, but the other sheers off like a shard of bone just past the elbow. She is grisly and repugnant and rightly unseen.

  And then Paul turns round from his fire making. What his malady is, I cannot tell, but the skin on his face, neck, and the backs of his hands has been deeply scarred. The rest of him seems untouched.

  I wonder if they’ll leave me here by the door until I die. Or mayha
p I already passed into death on the apothecary lane, and this is the underworld, Paul and Brida two demons. If so, they are curious. I hear Paul behind me picking up the piss pot, the ewer, the broom, then climbing the ladder to the loft.

  ‘A dung heap. Floor hasn’t been scrubbed in a month of Makersdays, and nary a crumb to be seen,’ he says, coming back down with something in his hand.

  ‘What do you expect?’ says Brida. Then, ‘What’s that?’

  ‘Better than crumbs,’ he answers, and I hear the slosh of liquid. The jug of spirits.

  All at once Paul’s dragging me towards the fire. He lets me down so close, I can feel my hairs burning. Does he mean to scar me like himself?

  ‘Brida?’ Paul says, impatient-like.

  ‘Just here,’ she answers, and I feel a cool rush, then burning about my neck. She’s pouring the spirits on my wound. ‘Hush, now,’ Brida soothes. ‘Will loosen the thickened blood. The cloth’s stuck in there fast.’

  ‘Stop your mouth!’ Paul’s curdled jaw is set. ‘You should not speak to her. We should have nought to do with her.’

  ‘Very well, I shan’t speak,’ says Brida brightly. ‘But do stitch her up, dearie. She can’t be worse than me, and you haven’t been cursed by our association.’

  ‘I very much beg to differ, you old sack of pus,’ spits Paul. ‘I was not born to coarseness. I have gentle blood. If my life be not cursed, you have surely begun to lose your wits along with your limbs.’

  There’s a wet snorting sound in response. Brida is laughing, a bubble of snot blooming out of the hole where her nose ought to be. ‘Oh, you.’

  A glint catches my eye. Paul’s threading a needle in the firelight. ‘I shall repair her wound. And, Maker help me, this act of charity will prove powerful mitigation for my past sins.’ The needle stabs into my neck, and I mewl like a rat dying in a trap.

  ‘She could eat your sins,’ suggests Brida.

  ‘Indeed,’ says Paul. ‘She shall eat my sins gratis, I hope.’

  ‘All the dried plums in town.’ Brida smiles. Plums are for fornicating with those you should not, like in incest. I wonder if they are sister and brother. He sounded like a Northerner, after all.

  Paul tugs the thread through my flesh, and I feel warm, new blood. Still, he’s clever with the needle. I never feel his skin against mine. Brida presses a soft cloth to my neck. It’s blood moss for between your legs when you’ve got your monthly courses. Paul must have found it up the ladder in the loft. Another prick and tug, and another. I seem to be in a river wherry again from the way the floor tilts and turns. And then somehow I’m back in my truckle bed, the one I had as a small child. The sound of my parents’ breath soothes me to sleep.

  When I wake, there are three stripes of daylight on the far wall. Brida appears above me. Through her gaping nose hole I see the white of bone.

  She leaves the old black pot from above the hearth at my side. It’s been cleared of cobwebs and warmed. I lift it and pour weak broth into my mouth. It tastes of sharp onion and mould.

  Brida sits on the stool. Paul’s sleeping hump rises and falls beyond. I finger the cloth at my neck. It’s dry. Then sleep swallows me back.

  When I wake again, the light says it’s afternoon. Paul’s peering out of a crack in the shutters. ‘A whole group,’ he says.

  ‘For us? Have they come for us?’ There’s fear in Brida’s voice. ‘It’s the witch who made that poppet they want.’

  ‘One of the Queen’s own ladies died just after that poppet was found. They’ll sweep up any they can easily lay the blame on,’ Paul tells her. ‘And if you don’t look like Eve’s own handmaiden, who does?’

  ‘I thought she might be a victim of the witch.’ Brida points towards me. ‘Terrible thing.’ As if they hadn’t been ready to rob my dead body.

  ‘There’s no constable with them,’ Paul assays through the shutters. ‘It looks to be merely a pack of dirty boys, Maker help us. I hope they don’t want food.’

  Messengers. I rise, my neck burning, and swoon back onto the rug.

  ‘Oh, now, it’s too soon for her to be up and about,’ says Brida to the room.

  My head conjures an image of the Sin Eater beneath the castle in some hell.

  I could still tell the Queen of the deer heart, I think. But, no, I vowed to the Maker I would not speak if he spared me, except to do my duty as a sin eater.

  I stand and wait for another swoon to pass. I stagger to the window. Six, no eight messengers. I must do my duty. I’ll help the Sin Eater when I think of a way.

  My shoes have reappeared by the hearth. That’s a kindness, though just pulling them on makes the stitches at my neck ache and sting.

  Brida looks to Paul. ‘Surely she can rest a piece more.’

  ‘I couldn’t care less what she does,’ Paul says.

  ‘She’s sharing her home with us,’ Brida says.

  Paul snorts, ‘And I risked my own flesh to save hers. As I see it, she is in my debt.’

  ‘She should rest a piece more,’ Brida says again.

  ‘The boys are likely the heralds of her trade, each one from a soul dead or dying,’ says Paul.

  Brida sighs wetly, ‘Then she must go.’

  When I open the door, the boys come forward, messages flying. It’s like crows fallen on a dead rabbit in a field, the larger ones pushing out the smaller, who squawk all the louder for it.

  I pick out the name Fletcher and Smithy Lane and start on my way. I nearly fall when a spell of faintness takes me by the town square. The boys kick at the dirt till I find my feet under me again. Messengers get their penny only after I arrive.

  John Fletcher lies on a bed of straw in the corner of a two-room cottage. He’s young enough, but his breathing comes hard, like his lungs are closing in on themselves. His wife clutches her hands at her middle.

  There’s one stool placed beside him. It takes a moment to remember it’s just me for the Recitation. Only me. Shame swells in my chest, so I hastily say the words to begin.

  My voice is so low and broken, it startles me. It startles the goodwife too. I notice her skin is chapped from a long winter, and there’s a red sore on her bottom lip. ‘The Unheard is now heard. The Unseen seen. Your flesh—’ How does it go? I’ve never properly learned the words. ‘I will bear your sins to my grave. Speak.’

  ‘All what you do as a boy,’ John Fletcher wheezes. ‘Teasing and brawling and scrumping from gardens.’ There’s a whistle that comes when he lets out his breath. Like blowing through your thumbs on a blade of grass. ‘Told a pack of lies every which way; forced a girl with two other fellows.’ His eyes dart towards his wife. One of her shoes scrapes against the floor. ‘Nothing boys won’t do. Was a beggar girl. Nothing you can blame boys for. She wanted it anyhow.’

  He’s inventing this last bit. I don’t know how I know, but the lie is like a smell or a taste you know right away.

  ‘Disobeyed my da and ma,’ he wheezes on. ‘Failed to say my prayers. And I killed a man.’ The goodwife’s shoe scrapes again. ‘It was not with intention, only mischance. I . . .’ The whistle when he breathes gets louder. ‘I hit him just the two times. Never thought it’d do him.’ He wheezes hard now. ‘A man . . . shouldn’t be brought down . . . by just two blows . . . Like a woman, he was . . . Was never my fault.’

  When he finishes, I go to the goodwife, her hands still clutched at her middle. I name the foods to prepare huskily. Gristle and roast pigeon. Pickled cucumber and mustard seed. Bitter greens. Pickled herring. Capon’s head for forcing oneself on a woman.

  But the killing. I don’t know what kind of heart to eat. This is why folk are apprenticed to masters. But I’ve lost mine. All I know is the story of Mr Fox.

  Clever Mary marries the rich Mr Fox. He tells his new bride she can go anywhere in his grand house, but she must never look in his cupboard. Of course one day, curiosity gets the better of her, and she opens the cupboard. Inside are the seven corpses of Mr Fox’s seven previous brides. Clever Mary hears Mr Fox
behind her. He says now she must go into the cupboard, as well, to keep his secret, but she runs to town to tell what she found. Of course no folk believe her because Mr Fox is rich and respected. They drive Clever Mary back home to him. Mr Fox is waiting to kill her, but just as he’s pushing her into the cupboard, she breaks a rib bone off one of the corpses and stabs Mr Fox with it. At his Eating, seven pig hearts sit atop his coffin, and the whole town finally learns of his crimes.

  But pig heart isn’t right. There are some sins so terrible they’re divided into different foods depending on how it happened. Like forcing oneself on a woman (capon’s head) is different from forcing oneself on a child (lamb’s head). Likewise, killing folk purposefully, which is a pig heart, is different from killing folk without intention. In my head I see the deer heart from Corliss’s Eating. What kind of killing was it for?

  The goodwife’s waiting, so I name goat heart, since goats are a kinder sort of animal than pigs, and killing without intention is kinder than plain murder. The goodwife nods, and John Fletcher does nothing but wheeze. Mayhap they don’t know either.

  Just as I’m leaving, a whisper slips from the goodwife’s lips. At first I think it must be thanks, but the words come out with different shapes. ‘He’ll go now,’ is what she says. She hands me two coins, looks at her husband and whispers it again. Like a prayer.

  The messenger boys await me outside. Two play a throwing game with a bit of wood. Another stamps on ants. A curly-haired boy about as high as my breast has gathered some of the others with a story. ‘And Corliss, the Queen’s governess, was the witch that made the poppet!’ the curly-haired boy finishes. Some of the boys nod solemnly.

  The ant stamper pauses in his stamping. ‘No, it was the Queen’s governess got cursed by the witch. That’s why she died. So she can’t be the witch.’

  I remember Corliss clutching her belly, just where the poppet was said to have been stuck with pig bristles. If a witch is at work in our town, no folk is safe.