Sin Eater: A Novel

by Megan Campisi

  I stir my blood, lift my head and walk towards them, praying they will move. They fold out of the way just before I reach them. Their nearness curls in my guts like filth spreading, going up to where my hair begins and down between my legs to where my other hair begins. I want to scratch and scrub the filth away and wash myself clean.

  Instead, I walk the floorboards to the stairs, feeling their gaze behind me, chanting my chant:

  I am the curse.

  I am more frightful than them.

  In an entire year living in this house I never once mounted the stairs. The old roof is too low for me to properly stand except where the house beams prop it up, and it all stinks of mildew. There are only two chambers on the second level, one shut tight, the other ajar. The mildew smell grows as I push the door open.

  It’s not the roof thatch that’s made the rotting smell. It’s her.

  White tallow candles are lit by the wall. She’s below a faded blanket atop a rope-strung bed. Old straw mattress ticking pokes out of a linen cover, embroidered with flowers. The bedcover is velvet and was once red, now the brown of an old bloodstain. The rogue dowager queen.

  Her eyes are milky in the candlelight, like eggs half boiled. ‘Who is it come?’

  My voice is not as full as I would wish. It comes out more as a bark. ‘The Unseen is now seen.’

  ‘Oh,’ she says, sharp-like. Then ‘Oh,’ again, this time as if a bit lost. She shifts in the bed, her papery skin rustling against the sheets. ‘Are my sons here?’ She turns her head as if looking about the room. ‘I would have them witness.’

  ‘Speak your sins,’ I say, taking a stool.

  She girds herself up, as if readying for a great speech. ‘I’ve done it all, all the worst and worse than that,’ she says with a sort of pride. ‘Must send a cook from the Orient to prepare some of my worser sins. You won’t fit the foods on the coffin lid.’ She waits for the words to land. The room is silent but for the whispers of her skin. ‘Can you call to my sons? I would have them witness.’ She’s prepared her Recitation, a celebration of her rogue life. But it’s the sort of thing that wants an audience, and none has come to hear. A blade of pity pokes in between my rib bones. I sit up straighter, to throw it off.

  She coughs sharp, mildewy phlegm, and reaches out a shaky arm for a cup. Her arm’s thin as a bird’s. In my mind I feel her hand’s back on my face, her knuckles striking my cheekbone. I feel the edge of a thrown ewer hitting my hip, leaving a half-moon scar to match my half-moon Daffrey smile. I remember a broom handle in her papery hands crashing against my ear. If I took her wrists in my hands now, I could snap them. Against the stool, I feel the breadth of my thighs. Pressing into my sides, I feel the heft of my arms. My breath drops deep and low into my belly and comes out as a laugh. She will never hurt me again.

  ‘What is it?’ she asks, nervous as a horse at my laugh.

  ‘None have come for you,’ I say. ‘Name your sins, old woman.’

  Her eyes try to make me out. ‘You’re the bastard.’

  ‘Your blood. Your daughter’s daughter.’

  ‘She never would deny you. Couldn’t resist the fruit of her own body. More fool her. Wise girls have the midwife kill the bastard before it makes its first cry. I offered to do it for her. Once it’s out and living, you never can deny it.’

  She wants to hurt me. I lean in. ‘I’m the only kin who would come. They know, your sons. They know you’re crossing to the Maker. They’d rather drink or game than sit by your stinking flesh and smell the piss on the sheets.’ The words roll out. She holds herself hard against them. ‘I am a curse,’ I say. ‘I am your curse. The one you made. I will eat a Simple Eating on your grave. You can go to Eve bearing the rest of your worst of the worst.’

  ‘You cannot,’ she cracks. ‘The Maker forgives all if it is recited.’ Her voice is thick and phlegmy. ‘Eat cream and mustard seed,’ she says with urgency. Jealousy and lies. ‘Drink sack . . .’ Mockery. ‘Black pudding, garlic.’ Revenge, miserliness. ‘Pork snout, duck tongue, roast pigeon.’ Smuggling, usury, thieving. She knows all the foods. ‘Eat a lamb’s heart.’ Killing a babe. ‘Tell me you will. Tell me you will eat the foods from my coffin.’

  She’s not my granddam any more, just an old, scared woman close to death. The plum stone in my heart grates against my rib bones. I want to dig it out with my thumb and force it down her throat.

  ‘I will eat your sins,’ I whisper around the plum stone. ‘I will carry them to my grave.’

  She sinks back against the bed, quiet.

  I leave the house. I walk down the lane lined with its thin grass blades. Daffrey or Owens. Why must these be the choices? What if I could be something new, like the green shoots coming up out of plain earth. Something all to myself.

  I go to Northside’s tavern row. I look in tavern after tavern until I find them. Misgett’s deep in a card game with a table full of other rogues. He puts down a card bearing a queen and a black flower. Uric’s perched, silent as a carrion eater, on a stool nearby. The table chatter hushes. I stare first at Misgett, then at Uric. ‘I give you the foods for your mother’s Eating.’ Both men get still.

  I list the foods, then let the moment get heavy. When the weaker rogues begin to fidget in the silence, I say, ‘Fail in her Eating, and the food will rot atop your own coffins, for never will I touch it.’ I reach across the table. The other rogues hiss and jerk away, one uttering the Maker’s Prayer under his breath. Misgett doesn’t move and doesn’t stop me either. I take the queen with a black flower. A token of the Daffreys.

  24. GINGERBREAD

  I EXPECT THE PLUM stone in my chest to be gone. It’s still there, stuck hard. In the stink of Dungsbrook, a few lanes from home, I find home is not where I’m going.

  My fingers follow along the wall for balance in the indoor dark. I can smell the tallow candles burning.

  The Instrument Maker looks at me uncertainly from his workbench, the unfinished wooden body of a lute in his arms. When I walk towards him, he stands up quick, overturning the bench. I step over it to clutch him, wrap my arms around him, press my face into his chest. There’s a short questioning bark on his lips as he tries to guess what I’m after. His breath pushes against me, and he twists to find his balance against the fallen bench.

  I grasp him tighter, a shaking sob coming from deep in my guts. He gets still, his heart thumping through his skin. I press all of me against him. His body is taut, resisting, yet to me it’s the soft protection of my father. He tries to turn from me, but he’s the breathing warmth of the Country Mouse. He doesn’t embrace me back, but he’s my mother. He is all the folk no longer with me and all the folk I cannot have.

  My sobs are hard and awkward, and snot and saliva smear across his shirt. The sobs come faster and faster, then slower and slower, till I’m left with hiccups. My fingers loosen around him, but he doesn’t pull away. He lays the lute, still clutched in his hand, down on the floor. Then he takes my hand.

  He pulls the bench up and sits me on his lap. A callus on his thumb brushes my palm. Short, dark hairs skim my wrist. I forgot all the ways you can feel another person. I push my cheek against his jaw to feel his beard. I leave my brow in front of his lips to feel his breath. I want to get inside him. I want him to hold every part of me. It’s like when I was so hungry for food, and I could think of nothing else. I am the same hungry for touch, warmth, skin, breath.

  I pull the neck of his shirt open and push my face in, his curly hairs going up my nose. I pull, pull, pull at the shirt until his whole chest is bare. He lets me do it. Even helps pull the shirt over his head, then holds me close against him.

  My legs find their way around his hips until I am buried in his arms. My breath matches his, the hiccups catching me only now and again. I open my hands against his back, soaking in his warmth like sunshine.

  Skin has a smell I had forgotten. A small smell. It’s different from the big smells like Paul’s farts or Brida’s rot. Skin smell you have to be up close for. His
smells like raw wood and sharp varnish and the gamey smoke of tallow candles. I breathe into him, and he breathes into me. It is the closest I have ever been to another body since I was a child.

  When I am done, when I have swallowed up all his touch, I pull my breath apart from his, his body from mine. We sit looking at each other, his eyes filling me full up.

  Gentle-like, his fingers rise towards my face, but they stop just before they get there. At my collar. He touches the S. He touches the heavy brass it hangs from. His fingertips crawl around the collar like a spider until they reach the back. They tug and pry gently, hunting for something. I watch the Instrument Maker’s eyes open in surprise when he finds no latch. I watch his surprise grow to a shuddering anger when he discovers the lock. Then, suddenly, he’s at his worktable, scrabbling for tools.

  He stands behind me working at the lock. He stops twice to light fresh candles. He’s a fool, I think, as he works. The Maker sealed this lock. But it feels good just to have him there tending to me, his arms bumping warmly against my shoulders, like when my mother would plait my hair.

  And then all at once, there’s a click. It’s quiet, but I hear it like firewood splitting under the axe. The warmth of his body leaves me as he steps back.

  For a moment I can’t even breathe. I don’t dare. Then I bring my hands to my neck. The circlet gives under them, hinging open. I pull off my collar.

  My chest bone floats up, like a brush bobbing in a tub. I feel so light. Bare.

  The Instrument Maker speaks. At first I think he’s said a stranger word, but then I hear it.

  ‘Free,’ he says.

  25. BLACK PUDDING

  IN MY LOFT I lie on one side of the mattress. The collar lies on the other.

  Free. I don’t know what that means.

  I thought I did. I thought it was stealing orange suckets at the market. Or being a curse. But now I don’t know.

  I touch the place where the collar sat. Grey skin peels off like cobwebs. The inside of the collar itself is scaled with the stuff. And crumbs too. I don’t know how they got in there.

  Without a collar to mark me, I could run away. Is that what free means? To brave the roads to another town where no folk know me? I still wouldn’t be able to speak. I’d need to hide my marked tongue. But I could find the other unseen, whores and lepers. Beg them to take me in. Hide in the dark corners of the town, stealing food, shivering through winter, praying the constables don’t whip me and burn my ear through as a vagrant. It sounds worse and worse the more I think on it. Is this what free means?

  Mayhap I could go elsewhere. Farther away. Slip onto a barge headed downriver, and then onto a bigger boat. One going to a stranger land, like where the Instrument Maker comes from. A land where they don’t believe in sin eaters. I could just be a girl again. A girl with no kin. Unable to understand the land’s tongue. Among heretics and heathens. Is that free?

  I hear Jane down the ladder scolding her children. They’re playing hide-your-head with the ewer. I get a twist of sad, right in my heart, thinking about running away to another place. I grouse about Brida and Paul, Jane and Frederick, but they’ve come to be solidly on the side of company. They’re my folk.

  The twist turns to an ache. This town is home. Da’s buried here. All my memories are stuck here, in these roads and houses, these folk. This earth and sky. I feel like a wherry that’s come untied in heavy rains, spinning off in swift, dark water.

  Is this what free feels like? I ask the collar. But it doesn’t know what free means either.

  A rapping sounds at the front door.

  My heart seizes up. Not now. I tell the collar. Not before I’ve sorted this out.

  But the rapping comes again, hard. Must be a Recitation. A soul that can’t wait.

  You are the only one who can unburden it, says the collar.

  They could make another sin eater, I say back.

  Would you have the recorder do that? the collar asks. Curse another girl like you? Would you be free then?

  And in this moment I know that running away will never make me free. My soul carries the sins of this town. I’ll carry them with me until I die. I can’t shed them any more than I can shed the memories of my da or my Daffrey blood.

  I look at the collar softly gleaming in the afternoon light. It seems to take up as much space as me.

  Another rap comes at the door. I still don’t know the answer, but there’s a soul that can’t wait. I place the collar back around my neck, securing it in place with a pin bent through the hinge where the lock sat. I go to meet the messenger.

  Walking down the road, the collar bumps against my neck. It’s too loose. I worry that the pin will slip out, it’ll clatter to the ground, and the Makermen will come and lock the collar up again. But the pin holds. I arrive at an alehouse.

  The Recitation’s for a girl not much older than me called Jenny Brown. Jenny’s abed with a cut foot that’s festered. She’s fevered, coming in and out of waking, and there’s red streaks running up her leg. Her mother sits close by with a wet cloth to cool her. She wears the apron of an alewife. Jenny’s da prays in the corner. They’re plain folk, like mine were. I wonder if my life might have been like this if things had gone another way.

  It takes a moment for Jenny’s eyes to find mine and then another to grasp what they see. When they do, a little well of tears springs up and out of her eyes, down her cheeks. She clutches her mother’s hand. ‘I don’t want to leave,’ she whispers. ‘I don’t want to go without you.’

  I know the fear of losing your ma and da. ‘You won’t be alone,’ I tell her. ‘So many folks have passed on to the Maker before you. They’ll be waiting.’

  ‘Auntie Rose,’ her mother says soft. ‘Grandpapa Saul.’

  Jenny nods a little nod. A thought catches her. ‘I’ll be judged for my sins?’ Her mother squeezes her hand, but she can’t give her daughter comfort.

  ‘I’ll take your sins for you,’ I say.

  There’s a break in Jenny’s fear, a little relief that pulls at her lips until they almost smile. ‘Will you?’ she asks.

  I nod until she nods along with me, until her mother’s nodding too. Until Jenny’s smile breaks into a little choked laugh.

  ‘I haven’t done anything,’ she says. I think she’s talking about her sins, but then she keeps on going. ‘I haven’t done anything yet. In my life. I wanted to . . . I always hoped that when I passed, I would have done something. Something of substance. Been a mother. Or a midwife. Or even just made ale that folk wanted to tell their neighbours about.’ She laughs at this, but then it turns to crying. ‘All I’ve done is alehouse dishes.’

  ‘You’ve been a daughter,’ I tell her.

  ‘Did my life matter?’ her voice cracks.

  I grasp for words to reassure her, but I don’t know the right ones. So I nod, strong and sure. I say, ‘You’ll be remembered.’

  Back on my mattress, I lie again side by side with the collar. It’s like a bedfellow. Like if I had a sister. But this sister is a sin eater. And me, lying across the mattress looking at her, I’m just May. Da’s girl. My mother’s daughter. Me.

  Mayhap freedom is being able to be more than one thing. Like, I could be May right now, here lying in bed. And if I get up and put on the collar, then I’m choosing to be a sin eater. When I take the collar off, I can go back to just being May. Mayhap freedom is choosing for yourself. Even if the choices are piss-poor.

  As sleep comes over me, a stray thought bobs to the surface of the well in my mind. It’s the banner of Katryna, the Queen’s stepmother: a fair-haired maiden coming out of a flower. The fair hair reminds me of another fair-haired maiden. There’s a little click in the wards of the lock. It seems plain once the notion’s in my mind.

  I thought that Black Fingers might be the killer behind the muddle, but he can’t be. The killer is trying to ruin the Queen by uncovering her bastard. Black Fingers doesn’t want the Queen harmed. He wants to get an heir on her.

  And the
Willow Tree wants the Queen to stay on the throne too. His gruesome witchcraft in the Makerhall was all to protect her.

  The killer isn’t either of them. The killer is somefolk in a desperate predicament. One with piss-poor choices.

  Fair Hair, the lock whispers. I saw her embracing Black Fingers. And plumped up like she’s with child. If she is pregnant by Black Fingers, who wants to marry the Queen, she might be desperate enough to hurt the Queen however she can. Particularly if she fears the Queen had Black Fingers’s first wife thrown down a set of stairs. If the Queen were dethroned for killing a bastard, for instance, Black Fingers wouldn’t want her any more. Fair Hair would be free to marry him. Free.

  Could Fair Hair have understood the secret message in the tapestry? I remember Mush Face reading a stranger book with drawings in it. Mayhap Fair Hair knows stranger tongues too. I once saw Fair Hair coming out of the herb dispensary. Herb dispensaries are where some poisons can be got.

  I look up at the sin eater boxes. The one with the seashell. The one with the badly done embroidery. The one with a lock of hair. What will be in mine when I pass on? What markers are there of me and what I’ve lived? That I’ve mattered?

  An empty bottle of poppy oil

  A salt cellar

  A playing card

  This living is so hard. I want a marker of it. A marker of Ruth dying. Of Black Fingers nearly killing me. Of the Willow Tree’s black magic. Of all the fright and confusion the folk at the castle have caused me. I want to catch Fair Hair. I want to catch her and make her feel all the grief she’s caused me. And when I do, I will cut a golden curl from her head and put it in my box as a token.

  26. HONEY CAKE

  THE THING ABOUT piss pots is that they’re in your chamber. So if you’ve got one, you don’t need to find a jakes. To catch Fair Hair, I’m going to need a jakes.

  I lie abed in the slats of dawn light. Sometimes in the morning, the shiny, cunning notions you have in the night come back grey and small. I give mine a good think over. They’re still shiny.