The Sin Eater

by Sarah Rayne

  Michael did so, and Owen picked up a slightly mildewed book and brandished it.

  ‘I’d set a group of second years an essay on the background to the birth of Home Rule in Ireland,’ he said. ‘And one of them came up with the fact that the eighth Earl of Kilderry led a group of local men in one of the Fenian Risings against the British. Well, I’d never heard of Kilderry, let alone its having an Earl all to itself, so I was a bit suspicious – they aren’t above making these things up purely for the hell of getting one up on the lecturer. So I looked it up.’

  ‘And had he made it up?’

  ‘No, he had not. Don’t you hate it when your students wrong-foot you like that? Although I suppose it doesn’t happen to you; an Elizabethan sonnet is an Elizabethan sonnet for all time. Anyway,’ said Owen briskly and before Michael could argue this intriguing subject, ‘round about 1900 somebody wandered around the west of Ireland, collecting stories for an anthology. I followed the source to its root and unearthed the actual book, and the Earl of Kilderry did exist. The middle to late 1800s it was, and it seems he was a roistering old sinner.’

  ‘What were his sins?’

  ‘Drink, women, thieving, every kind of debauchery. Reading between the lines there was probably the odd murder, too. Even allowing for the Irish habit of exaggeration he seems to have lived a very fruity life. There’s a brief biog of him here,’ said Owen, reaching for the book. ‘Listen, I’ll read the opening.

  ‘“During the middle years of the nineteenth century, the eighth Earl of Kilderry was notorious in Kilderry itself and also the surrounding villages. He was known locally as the Wicked Earl, and maidservants at Kilderry Castle [editor’s note: castle abandoned in the 1880s] would tell how he sent for them to come to his bedchamber, sometimes singly, but more often in twos and threes, where they would be forced to pleasure the Earl in whatever way occurred to him. He was also known to be a devotee of the ancient British tradition of the droit de seigneur, exercising a feudal right to deflower all virgins the night before they went to their marriage bed. Despite being a scion of an old and honourable line—” Sorry about that snobby touch, Michael, I told you this was all written around 1900, so it . . . Where was I?’

  ‘Scion of an old and honourable line.’

  ‘Oh yes. “Despite that, the Wicked Earl had misappropriated considerable sums of money, by theft, forgery, and fraud, but it did him little good in the end, for by 1880 Kilderry Castle was a virtual ruin.” One gets,’ said Owen, in parenthesis, ‘a marvellous image of this bawdy old sinner moving from room to room in his tumbledown ancestral home, trying to stay one step ahead of leaking roofs and death watch beetle, absent-mindedly rogering anything that strays in his path as he does so.’

  ‘That’s the downfall of many a stately home,’ said Michael solemnly.

  ‘Rogering?’

  ‘Death watch beetle.’

  ‘Too true.’ Owen grinned, then recommenced reading. ‘“Perhaps the most curious tale about Gerald Kilderry is told by a former servant of the Kilderry family, who was still living in Kilglenn at the end of the nineteenth century.”’

  He broke off and looked at his watch. ‘You’d better read the next part for yourself,’ he said. ‘It’s apparently a first-hand account from a maidservant who was at Kilderry Castle for a number of years – quite good primary source stuff if it’s genuine. I’ve got to get changed before we set off for the bunfight – did you know I’m saying grace at the lunch this year?’

  ‘How are you saying it?’ asked Michael, taking the book. Oriel College had a tradition at formal Hall of reciting an ancient Latin grace ascribed to Erasmus, and the present Dean was trying to establish his own small sub-tradition by choosing a different member of the college to say grace at his own Christmas lunch. A modest rivalry had grown up to see who could produce the most unusual form; last year had been a Greek Orthodox version which, as somebody pointed out later, was all very well, but had only been comprehensible to the Modern Language scholars.

  ‘I’ve found a really ancient form that the source swears was used at Hever Castle when Ann Boleyn was a girl,’ said Owen gleefully. ‘And it certainly has an early Tudor ring to it.’

  ‘That ought to rock them in the aisles.’

  ‘Yes, and I need to run over it again because I don’t want it to sound forsoothly.’

  He vanished into the adjoining bedroom, and Michael sat down by the window and began to read.

  NINE

  When I was a girl most people went up to the castle into the service of the Kilderry family. I was twelve when I went, and it was when the old Earl, who most people called the Wicked Earl, was there, although I never called him that in case he got to hear of it.

  People said the castle was the worst ruin in Ireland, but coming from a cottage with twelve of us, it seemed a palace to me. I thought the massive grey walls and the tangled gardens were like something out of a fairy story, although the mice overran the sculleries and the constant dripping of water where the roof leaked would drive you mad if you let it. The Master had no money to repair the roofs because he spent it all chasing women or fighting the British. So we set traps for the mice and put buckets to catch the water when the rain came in, though you had to remember where everything was, or you’d step on a mousetrap in the dark and nearly lose a toe, or trip over a bucket and send it clanging down a flight of steps, with a sound fit to wake the dead before judgement day. About the British we did nothing at all. We left that to the likes of the Master and his friends, although the cook used to go up to the turret and wave the frying pan and cheer when they marched off for a battle.

  I had to sweep and polish the library every week. Rows and rows of books there were – I used to touch them thinking one day I might understand the symbols on the paper. When the Master wasn’t away, hiding out from angry husbands or plotting confusion to the British, he sat in that room in the evening. It was a grand room: the logs burned up in the hearth so everywhere was scented with peat, and in the candlelight you never noticed the shredded fabric of the curtains where the mice chewed them, or the bullet holes in the walls where the Master had once shot a man he said was a British spy, although I never knew the truth of that.

  If the Master was in a room you never really noticed anyone or anything except him anyway, for he had the way of filling up the entire place just by being there. People said he wasn’t handsome, but once you saw him you never looked at anyone else. He had eyes that you could imagine were searching for your soul, and that they would eat it if they found it.’

  Eyes that would eat your soul . . . That was a disturbing phrase, whatever your beliefs. Michael broke off his reading for a moment and from the doorway Owen said, ‘All right?’

  ‘Perfectly. It’s very vivid this, isn’t it?’

  ‘I love that energetic way the Irish have of speaking – and of writing,’ said Owen. ‘But you have to bear in mind that they’re the storytellers of the world. And if some of them were invited to recount their bits of legend and lore for a book, they’d have a high old time.’

  ‘I’ll allow for exaggeration,’ said Michael, and read on.

  The unknown maidservant had apparently told the book’s compiler that the one thing no one could ever overlook in the library at Kilderry Castle was a set of carved pieces for a game called chess.

  ‘I was supposed to dust them every week, but I never did, for they glared so fiercely from their carved faces you’d think it was the devil peering out of the bits of wood and stone. The first time I saw them I ran from the room.

  People called the Master the Wicked Earl, but he could be generous to his own people. One or two of the female servants had trouble and in any other household they’d have been thrown out, but the Earl never did that. ‘Ah, Mary,’ he’d say, ‘hadn’t you the self-control to say “no”?’ Or, he’d say, ‘Oh, Fidelia, did you have to be taking your pleasures so carelessly?’

  And then he’d make some provision for the babies born that way, and Mary
and Fidelia would continue in his service, and life would go on much as before. Those of us who had a young man knew we shouldn’t do those things that made babies, but hadn’t we the example of the Earl himself before us, and him bedding any number of fine ladies over the years and likely siring many a son or daughter outside of wedlock.

  And hadn’t some of the young men who came courting us such charm you couldn’t resist them? When I walked with Fintan Reilly through the lanes, and he slid his arm round my waist, I’d pray to the saints not to succumb and lose all my virginity in one go.

  There came a night at Kilderry Castle when the wind screeched across the Moher Cliffs like tormented banshees. It was a week before Christmas, and there was snow flurrying inside the wind. We all huddled round the scullery fire and when a loud knocking came at the door we jumped, for you wouldn’t expect anyone to be abroad on such a night. The butler opened the door, and it was a priest asking to see the Master – a man from somewhere near Galway, so the butler told us. They say Galway’s a fine city, although I was never there. But we all agreed that wasn’t it strange for a man of God to be calling on the Master, but the cook said the devil made strange bedfellows, it was nothing do with us, and wasn’t it time we had our cocoa.

  Next morning I found that the priest had stayed the night with the Master, both of them in the library with the candles burning low and the fire sunk to embers. I went in to open the curtains at seven o’clock as I always did, and there they were, hunched over the table with the chess pieces. It had been snowing, and the cold snow-light streamed into the room. The Master was white and drawn and shrivelled-looking as if he’d spent one of his wicked nights – as if he’d spent a month of wicked nights all in a row – but the priest looked as calm as if he was about to say Mass. He was younger than I had thought from the butler’s words – mid-twenties, perhaps – and he had the most beautiful clear grey eyes I ever saw.

  The library was in a shocking state, with empty brandy bottles and glasses, and cigar stubs where they’d flung them carelessly into the fire, and it was God’s mercy they hadn’t burned the whole castle to cinders. While I was tidying up, tiptoeing around so as not to be noticed, the Master said, very softly, ‘You won’t get it, you know.’

  ‘Won’t I, though? I’ll have your devil’s chess set one way or another, Kilderry.’ He had a nice voice, like silk or a cat’s fur.

  The Master laughed. He said, ‘D’you know, it would please me to think of a priest possessing Lucifer’s chess set. Or would they excommunicate you?’ He studied the priest for a moment. ‘You know that the devil’s power’s said to come with those pieces?’

  ‘Didn’t I grow up knowing the legend?’ said the priest.

  ‘I dare say you did,’ said the Master. ‘But if you do ever get them, you should remember that the devil’s luck comes with them. That’s what I’ve had all these years,’ he said, bitterly.

  ‘I see that,’ said the priest, looking round the tattered library. ‘But the devil’s bargains were always hollow ones. Will we play on?’

  ‘We will,’ said the Master, and so they did, all through that day.

  The servants sat in the scullery, not knowing whether the guest should be offered food. The Master often went without food during the day, but hospitality for visitors was a strict rule. But just after midday he rang for more brandy and, as an afterthought, said they’d have some food as well, so, along with the brandy, the butler took one of cook’s game pies, together with bread and cold chicken.

  ‘Are they still playing chess?’ asked the cook when he returned.

  ‘They are. It’s my opinion that the priest is determined to get that chess set by fair means or foul.’

  ‘The Master won’t let him have it,’ said the cook. ‘He sets powerful store by that set.’

  ‘The Master,’ said the butler acidly, ‘likes people to think he was once in company with the devil, and that he won the devil’s own chessmen from him. But at the moment he wouldn’t notice if the entire contents of the castle were to be stolen under his very nose, for he’s as drunk as I ever remember him being.’

  ‘Is the priest drunk as well?’ I asked, a bit timidly, for although you hear of priests taking too much drink, it’s not something you talk about.

  ‘Alert as a cat at a mouse hole,’ said the butler sourly. ‘You’d swear he hadn’t touched a drop.’

  Just after three o’clock, with the wind shrieking down the chimneys and sending smoke into all the rooms, the library bell rang. When I went along to answer it, the Master was slumped back in his chair, and you’d be hard put to tell if he was drunk, dead, or merely asleep.

  The priest looked white and tired, but he smiled at me, although it was a smile he had to force from the dregs of his strength.

  ‘My guest is leaving, Eithne,’ said the Master, his eyes still closed, his speech slurred. ‘Get out of here,’ he said, not unkindly, but waving a hand in dismissal.

  The priest’s black cape was in the window alcove, so I went to fetch it. It was as I crossed the room that I saw something which has stayed with me ever since.

  On the chimney breast hung a large oval mirror in a gold frame. It reflected almost the whole of the room and I knew it well for it was one of my tasks to polish it, although it was so smoke-smeared from the years of wood fires that if you spent seven years cleaning it with seven mops it would still never come clean.

  The mirror reflected almost the whole room and it reflected the table with the chess set. I always tried not to look at those chess figures in the mirror, for somehow they were even more fearsome the wrong way round. But on this day I’m speaking of, I did look. And here’s the nightmare. The chessmen looked back at me with living faces and eyes that could see.

  I know it sounds as if I’d been at the Master’s brandy myself, but as God’s my witness it’s the truth. Those figures in the mirror had living breathing faces and glinting crimson eyes, and if ever I looked at the faces of demons from hell’s darkest cavern, I did so on that afternoon. When I turned back into the room, they were ordinary wooden figures once again.

  I don’t know if the Master or the priest saw those reflections. The priest said, ‘Thank you, Eithne,’ as I handed him his cape, and the Master, his eyes still closed, said, ‘I dare say I shan’t see you again.’

  The priest looked at him for a moment. Then he said, ‘I wouldn’t be too sure of that, Kilderry.’ Then he gave me his smile again and went out.

  Eithne, thought Michael, coming up out of the atmosphere of the ramshackle old Irish castle for a moment. Knowing the girl’s name made her suddenly vivid and real. Eithne, who as a young girl had gone fearfully to the tanglewood, Sleeping-Beauty castle and been so afraid of the chess figures she had run from the room.

  He read on.

  I always believed that time when the priest was at the castle woke something in the carved figures. For that same night, as I was going up to my bed, I thought I heard something creeping up after me. My room was at the very top of the castle so the stairs were narrow and steep and twisty. I had a candle to see my way, and I whipped round at once, holding up the candle to see down the stairwell. The shadows moved slightly, and although I couldn’t see anything, I could hear something breathing – a creaking, dry breathing it was, the sound you’d get if you had a lump of old yellow leather instead of lungs.

  I ran the rest of the way up the stairs and how I didn’t drop the candle and burn the whole of Kilderry Castle to the ground I’ll never know. But I got into my room and slammed the door shut – although when did a slammed door ever keep out the devil if he had a mind to enter? Still, I pulled the latch into place and dragged a chest across as barricade, and wound my rosary around the latch. Then I sat on my bed with my crucifix in my hands, my eyes on the door.

  It never moved, that door. Nothing rattled the handle, and nothing tried to push against it. But I knew something was there. It stayed there almost the entire night – I heard its leathery breathing, and twice the glimme
r of light around the edges of the door changed, as if something was moving around out there. Whatever it was, it knew what I had seen in the mirror, and it wanted to get at me. To stop me from telling the tale, would it be? I don’t know, for I haven’t the learning, but I’ve always thought that’s what it was.

  A little before dawn I fell asleep. When I woke it was to the memory of strange dreams and shadowy beings. Something was holding my hand as I lay in the bed – I didn’t mind that. It’s a comforting thing to have your hand held. I thought of my small sister at home with the rest of my family. She used to crawl into my bed and hold my hand if she had a nightmare.

  But then, little by little, I came more awake and I knew it wasn’t my sister’s hand. It was too small. And it felt dry and rough – and the fingers were tipped with tiny hard nails . . .

  I leapt out of bed and ran from the room, sobbing and gasping, and tumbled into the bedroom of one of the other maids. I said I had had a dreadful nightmare, and I spent what was left of the night there.

  They all thought it was a nightmare – the cook teased me about it a bit, saying what did I expect, walking out with that Fintan Reilly, a man to give a girl nightmares any day of the week!

  And perhaps it really was a nightmare, the feel of that small wizened hand clasping mine. I accepted the teasing and smiled for it was good-natured and affectionate, and I tried to think that what had happened really had been a nightmare. But later that day, I made sure to be the one to help cook with the scrubbing of the scullery floor, so as to scour my hands free of the feeling of that hand clasping mine. And that was the night I knew I would have to make sure the chess set was destroyed, although I did not, at that time, know how it could be done.

  Anyone who reads the fine book that’s to be written about old memories of Ireland might think my story nothing but a piece of foolishness. Eyes that would eat your soul, chess sets belonging to the devil that watched from mirrors . . . People might think me no better than the tinkers who tell wild tales to impress simple folk.