Sin Eater: A Novel Read online

  ‘The newspanto said the governess was a lamb among wolves,’ a boy with two missing teeth joins in.

  ‘It’s a wolf among lambs,’ bites back the curly-haired boy. ‘I saw the panto. The Queen’s secretary said she was a murderess and traitor. He said her crime was treason against the crown and against Queen Bethany, and there’ll be an inquiry into it because the governess was a wolf among lambs.’

  ‘Who’d she kill?’ asks the ant stamper. ‘Who got murdered?’

  ‘Sin eater ate deer heart on her coffin,’ is all the curly-haired boy says in answer.

  To be treason, Corliss would have had to kill royalty. Is that what the deer heart signifies? There hasn’t been royal folk who died since Queen Maris. And none before that except the old king. Unless you count Queen Maris’s babes that were lost in the womb.

  Was Corliss a killer and a witch who didn’t recite her sins? Who would dare such a thing if her soul’s endless torment was the cost? No, somefolk falsely blamed Corliss for murder.

  But the ant stamper asks a good question. If there really was a murder, who got killed? And if everyfolk thinks Corliss did it, then the true killer must still be out there. The thought makes me cold and hot in the same moment. Trying to shake the feeling off catches the boys’ attention.

  The ant stamper gathers himself quickest. An Eating near the Great Makerhall, he announces. The others come right in, all their words heaping atop the others. Recitation for an ailing child south of the river’s bridge. Recitation for Goodwife Miller. Eating at Spring’s Meadow Farm. Eating for the second son of the chandler near the guild house. And on and on and on.

  At day’s end, I make my way back to Dungsbrook. The Recitations melt together into one lumpen bit inside my head, but the tastes of other folk’s sins are still on my breath. Bitter greens for not saying prayers. Barley grains for cursing. Stewed gurnards for tale bearing. Hippocras for drunkenness. They make me feel melancholic and gassy. My neck aches. I want my rug by the fire. I want to sleep.

  As I get close to home, the smells of burning rubbish and shit and woad overcome the tastes in my mouth until all that’s there is the Dungsbrook reek. At least the sins are gone. Mayhap Dungsbrook has a useful side.

  Brida’s on my rug when I arrive. Paul stands before a low fire, wrapping his rags around him like he means to go out. I suppose hog boons and goblins keep their wanderings to the night.

  He gets still when I come in but doesn’t look to see who it is. Then he goes on dressing, taking care with each fold and wrap of the fabric. It takes a moment to realize he cares what he looks like. A vain monster! I laugh so loud Paul jumps. He recovers, wraps his face hastily, and hurries out of the door.

  ‘Tsk,’ Brida clucks at me from the rug by the hearth. Mayhap she doesn’t find it comical.

  For the first time, I take the ladder to the loft, though the climbing pulls on the stitches in my neck. I look about. There’s shelves with wooden boxes on them all up and down a wall, and, thank the Maker, a mattress. It’s been a good long while since I slept on one. I drop onto it, pretending I can’t smell that the ticking’s gone too long unchanged.

  But tired as I am, sleep won’t come. My mind is aflutter with pictures and thoughts. Why did Black Fingers knife me? Is he the witch who killed Corliss? Did he plant the deer heart on her coffin? All I know is that he hurt me because I spoke out about a murder. To stay safe, I must keep silent.

  A slice of moonlight comes in through the shutter. In its dim light, the wooden boxes on the shelves look like overlarge bricks. One box sits open at the foot of the mattress. I pull it into the moonlight for a look.

  It’s like a picture of a person. Not a real picture, but a likeness made up of what’s inside. There’s a copper band as is worn on the finger to signify marriage. There’s two bone pendants of the kind mothers give babies to protect against Eve’s eye, even though Makermen say it’s heathen. The leather strings are unworn. Babes that didn’t last. There’s a kerchief made of fine linen with two embroidered letters I don’t know. There’s a book bound in calfskin, mayhap for prayers. The prayer book brings a different picture to my mind: a dungeon, Black Fingers at the Sin Eater’s side, holding up a stone to crush a confession out of her.

  I never even learned her name.

  Quick-like, I replace her things, for they must be hers. I shove the box back at the foot of the mattress. But then Paul’s voice comes up the ladder. He’s returned. It gives me a notion.

  Box in hand, I climb down the ladder, careful not to strain at my stitches. Brida eyes me from the side like I’m an unbroken horse who’s bolted. I place the box by the hearth and hold up the Sin Eater’s kerchief.

  Paul looks away, but Brida half peeks.

  I point to the embroidered letters.

  ‘I don’t know what she wants,’ Brida tells Paul.

  I want so much to speak, a huff comes out of my lips.

  Instantly Paul turns away and urgently recites the Maker’s Prayer. I clamp my lips closed, but he goes on. I place my hand over my mouth.

  ‘Paul,’ Brida prompts above his prayer. ‘She won’t speak.’

  Paul stops short. ‘I want nothing to do with her.’

  I wish I didn’t need his help, but there’s no folk else. I hold up the kerchief again and point.

  ‘She’s just indicating the letters,’ Brida says.

  Paul lets his eyes graze over the cloth, ‘R. G.’

  And now I know the letters of her names. R for her given name. G for her family.

  ‘Wasn’t so hard now, was it?’ Brida scolds.

  ‘What would you know, you nasty corpse?’ Paul barks at her. ‘The indignities I bear! Travelling only in the night, blenching from constables’ lanterns, supping on other folk’s discarded filth, and closeting myself in a squalid little shack with this pollution!’ He waves towards me.

  ‘We could return to the sheepfold,’ Brida offers as if she’s accustomed to such rudeness.

  Paul begins to wrap his face as if he means to leave again. Which is just fine by me. He may have saved my life stitching up my neck, but he’s tempered like a goose. As he dresses, he catches sight of the book in the Sin Eater’s box. He gives a short laugh.

  ‘What is it?’ asks Brida.

  ‘A Compendium of Diverse Sins Both Large and Small and Their According Foods,’ Paul reads the words pressed into the book’s cover. ‘But our young sin eater hasn’t her letters. What a comedy!’ A few moments later the door slams shut behind him. Good riddance.

  Back in the loft the old ticking pokes at my hips as I crawl onto the mattress. Her mattress. R . . . Rose? I let my body soften into the packed places where her big body once rested. Rebecca? I find the dip where her head used to lie. Ruth? Ruth, a solid name.

  And the name of the folk she comes from? Glover? Granger? Garrington? I try all the names I know, but none seems right. My eyes go to her box. I still haven’t found a way to help her. It keeps me shifting and turning for hours in the nest of her imprint.

  8. PIGEON PIE

  IT’S STILL DARK when I’m woken from my fitful sleep by a rapping sound. Somefolk at the door, I think, then sink back into sleep. I dream I’m at home, my true home, and my mother’s making fine cakes for Makersday dinner. She keeps knocking the wooden spoon against the bowl. Thunk. Thunk. Thunk. Then I’m awake again, the rapping at the door coming harder.

  Out of the shutter, I see a pale, little messenger boy, a long woollen nightcap atop his head, calling me to a Recitation that can’t wait till morning. I grab my shawl and crawl down the ladder. Brida and Paul are both gone, and the hearth is cold.

  ‘A Recitation for Tilly Howe,’ the boy tells me. ‘Tilly Howe at the castle.’

  The castle. I don’t want to go back. Black Fingers is there.

  But the castle is where the Sin Eater is too. Ruth, I christened her last night.

  You must go, says the still-dark sky. My throat tightens, and my stitches burn.

  It’s your duty to obey,
say the stones on the road.

  Their voices grow as loud as the messenger’s and finally there’s nought to do but go.

  By the time I reach the castle gate, morning’s come and the roads have filled up even though it’s Makersday and folk are meant to rest.

  Once inside the gate, I follow the messenger to the scroll door. The scroll door again. The castle is a large place with all sorts of rooms and all sorts of folk, so it gives me a cold feeling along the back of my neck to have returned to the same door.

  I’m terrified of coming upon Black Fingers. As long as I’m not alone he can’t harm me, I think, stepping quicker after the messenger ahead. And as long as I stay silent, I’ll be safe.

  We pass the tapestry of the goat-deer, its wefts made of rough wool. Then the one showing unicorns made of finer wool and so brightly dyed the trees behind the creatures look real. I pass more tapestries, each more valuable than the last, so I know we’re returning to the Queen’s own chambers. Behind the messenger, I trail my fingers across the hangings, feeling the weaves grow finer and finer without even needing to look.

  I’m left in the Queen’s sitting room again. The Painted Pig who was at Corliss’s Recitation is atop a stool embroidering a red figure on a yellow field. Her ruff today is so large I don’t know how she sees over it to make her stitches. Above her on the wall is the naked-lady tapestry that looks like the Queen. Diana of the Wood, Mush Face had called it.

  Mush Face herself is nearby, looking at drawings in a book. I can see shapes with horns and crosses.

  The Painted Pig pauses to wave her embroidery at Mush Face’s book, ‘In plain sight? With the Queen’s physician even now interrogating suspected witches?!’

  ‘The ancient scholars were witches, were they?’ asks Mush Face, not looking up from the book.

  ‘That is no Greek scholarship, I know that much,’ mutters the Painted Pig.

  Mush Face turns a page. My slippers are uncomfortable. I look down to find I’ve put them on the wrong feet, and the left foot, which is longer, pinches in the toe of the right.

  ‘Womanly arts like stitching are too good for you?’ the Painted Pig goes on, raising her stitching. I see now it’s a badge she’s making, most like her family heraldry.

  ‘You’re uneasy,’ says Mush Face to the Painted Pig, eyes still on her book. ‘I could fetch some wine to calm your nerves.’

  ‘I don’t need wine,’ snaps the Painted Pig. ‘There are queer happenings these days. Poppets, pomegranates, deer hearts . . . We are in danger. And you’ – the Painted Pig looks at Mush Face – ‘sitting there with your books thinking yourself so clever.’

  ‘Perhaps it is because I am.’ Mush Face finally looks up. She catches me from the side of her eye but doesn’t startle. ‘Shall I fetch that wine?’ Mush Face offers again.

  At that moment a maid arrives. ‘Begging your pardons, great ladies,’ she curtsies. ‘The guards were meant to show the’ – she stops and clears her throat – ’the sin eater to the chamberers’ rooms.’

  ‘Who is it she’s called for?’ asks the Painted Pig.

  ‘Tilly Howe, milady. Old Doctor Howe’s daughter.’

  Like a great tree yielding to a woodcutter, the Painted Pig shrieks once, then faints dead away off her stool.

  It’s her belly that’s brought Tilly Howe to bed, something painful that comes in waves. A woman of an age with Tilly, perhaps forty years, sits nearby. ‘Tilly, to think, you were right as rain not one day ago.’

  ‘Oh, Meg,’ Tilly says to the friend, ‘I never felt the like. You must send word to my father. He’s only a day’s walk away.’

  ‘Let me call the Queen’s physician,’ Meg offers. That must be the Willow Tree.

  ‘He’s a conjuror,’ spits Tilly.

  ‘He’s not your father,’ Meg says. ‘But he’s learned.’

  ‘A sham, the belly knows,’ Tilly mutters. The belly knows. My mother would say that sometimes. It’s for when you know something deep, deep in your guts, even if reason says it’s wrong.

  ‘The Queen sent lemon balm,’ Meg says, I think to cheer Tilly.

  Tilly smiles a small smile. Then a wave of pain comes, and it’s almost like a fit the way Tilly’s body seizes. Her breath quickens, ‘Has the . . . has she come?’

  Meg looks my way. ‘Yes, she’s here.’

  Tilly looks over, and her head jerks back. ‘Not her! The Queen. I had hoped she might . . .’ Tilly braces for another wave. When it passes, her face’s gone slack, like a sheet dunked in water. ‘Is it time for the sin eater, then?’

  Meg says nothing.

  ‘Don’t leave my side.’

  ‘Won’t never, Tilly. Won’t never.’

  I bring a stool to Tilly’s bed. Meg clutches her hand. ‘Think, you’ll soon join the Maker.’

  ‘I don’t know, Meg,’ Tilly pinches the bedsheet. ‘I’ve my sins.’ Tears well up in Tilly’s eyes, and another painful wave shakes them loose.

  ‘You helped bring enough souls into this world to balance whatever sins you carry,’ Meg clucks. Tilly nods, and then there’s silence.

  ‘The Unseen is now seen. The Unheard is now heard,’ I begin. ‘The sins of your flesh become the sins of mine to be borne to my grave in silence. Speak.’

  Tilly turns her head. ‘Well, what have we got?’ Now that she can look at me, she assays me good and proper. ‘Just a young thing. What are you, fourteen? Of an age with the Queen when I first met her, oh, what a time!’ she says. Another wave of pain takes hold, and she waits for it to pass before sinking back into her memories. ‘My da worked for the Queen’s stepmother Katryna. He was her physician, my da. Katryna wasn’t queen any more by that point, of course. Katryna wasn’t royal blood, so when the old king died, the crown went to his daughter Maris. Bethany was just a girl, living in Katryna’s household.

  ‘Oh, but Katryna was kind to my father, let him bring me along when he worked. She was the one who warned him to burn his books when Maris came to the throne. A true believer in the new faith, he still is.’ Tilly holds herself still a moment, waiting for the pain to come and go.

  ‘Should get to it, shouldn’t I?’ Tilly gathers herself. ‘Goodness me. Here it is: I always liked a sweetie, I did. I fret my mother so, like as I was to pluck a plum from a pie before it was served,’ Tilly breaks again for the pain. But her story brings faint pink to her cheeks, and she seems to fare a little better than before. She goes through gluttony (her love of sweets), drunkenness (her love of wine), white lies from helping mothers in childbirth (‘the worst is past, now’s just pushing’). Like her father she had the knack for healing. She takes me through her life, sin by sin, pausing for pain.

  My own mind wanders back to when I was young. When you’re little it’s like each moment is its own lifetime. I remember collecting leaves just past dawn one morning, brown, orange, yellow and soaked with rain so they stuck in great, flat cakes to the rake. Da and Mother came outside ready for the Makerhall, steam coming from their mouths like two pots on the fire. It was after the purgers came, but I still had the prayer beads Da had given me hanging from my apron.

  ‘Must throw them on the rubbish heap, May.’ Da’s eyes were full of brown leaves as he said it. I didn’t understand why a pretty gift from my da could matter to grown folk. ‘Do it now,’ he said while my mother stamped her foot to loosen a clod of mud from her shoe.

  I threw my rake to the ground and refused. Mother had to hold me while Da took the beads. Later I understood folk were killed for such things. Wars were fought for such things, and might be again. Maris’s burnings, Queen Bethany’s purgers. Faith is a bloody business.

  ‘And then, well,’ Tilly goes on. ‘Seeing as I never married, I kept assisting my father in Katryna’s household. Katryna was still young. Oh, and clever. She and the Queen’s governess, Corliss, and the other ladies all at their books, studying, studying, all the time. That sham of a doctor here in Bethany’s court was about then too. Not a physician yet, but a tutor. He taught the ladies t
he old tongues, Greek and Hebrew. Spoke three languages, Katryna did. Knew mathematics. Astrology, too. Mmm.’ She smiles at the memory. Then a grimace passes over her face. ‘But she chose to remarry, Katryna did. To Baron Seymaur. A wolf, that man. Katryna was blind in love. And you couldn’t say they weren’t a handsome couple. Good families, both with claims to the throne. Of course, the baron lost his head for such ambitions. But back then, before all that, they married, and Katryna was with child before you could blink.

  ‘My father served her through her confinement. Died not long after giving birth, she did. Her wolf of a husband betrayed her. That’s why she died. Not her body, but her heart broke.’ She squeezes Meg’s hand and waits for a wave to pass. ‘And little Bethany, barely past childhood, living in the same house. Never imagined she’d be queen, what with her married sister on the throne sure to soon have an heir—’ Tilly suddenly pauses, and not for pain.

  ‘But then,’ she says. ‘But then.’ Something’s stuck in her thoughts. ‘I shouldn’t speak of it. I spoke of it once and I fear . . . But I must, mustn’t I?’ She looks at Meg.

  ‘Cast off your burdens,’ Meg comforts.

  Tilly looks away and takes a ragged breath. ‘Is it treason to deceive one of royal blood?’

  ‘Why, Tilly!’ hisses Meg.

  ‘Oh, now, Meg, I’ve lived a life.’

  ‘But, Tilly, you surely did no such thing,’ Meg’s eyes are wide and white in her face. ‘As I heard it, when Katryna went into seclusion for the birth, she was already doing poorly. Whatever you told her as she lay dying was surely not deception.’

  Tilly shakes her head. ‘Wasn’t her. I made a promise to Bethany.’

  Meg’s head bobs in hesitation like a cat sniffing about a new room. ‘Tilly?’

  Tilly grasps suddenly for Meg’s hand, her eyes closed tight. ‘Coming quicker now,’ she whispers. More tears well up. ‘We all made a promise to Bethany, but we broke it. What could we do? We wanted her to be queen. Oh, it burns so!’