BEFORE
OAT PORRIDGE
SALT FOR PRIDE. Mustard seed for lies. Barley for curses. There are grapes too, laid red and bursting across the pinewood coffin – one grape split with a ruby seed poking through the skin like a splinter through flesh. There’s crow’s meat stewed with plums and a homemade loaf, small and shaped like a bobbin. Why a loaf in such a shape? I think. And why so small? There are other foods too, but not many. My mother had few sins. She was a fox, running from the scent of trouble with wary eyes and soft feet. Tussling only when she was sure she’d win. The salt, mustard seeds, and barley grains are the only foods I know the sins for. They’re for childhood sins, the kind parents chasten you with or children sing rhymes for in the street.
Little Jack Horner,
Sat in the corner,
Eating a winter pie.
He ate all its meat,
For being a cheat,
And said, ‘Now a good boy am I.’
The sin eater comes next, hefting her belly into the front room where the coffin sits, boards fresh and blunt from the saw, the nails placed but not sunk. She smells of wild onions already begun to sprout despite a full month until May Day. I feel ashamed at my small truckle bed in the corner, our house not fine enough for me to have a room of my own. The sin eater gruffs for a seat, and Bessie, our neighbour, brings her a stool. It disappears so completely under her skirts, I imagine her great buttocks swallowing it whole. A burp of laughter escapes my lips, and I clap my hands across my mouth.
Bessie takes me to the window. ‘You’re not to look,’ she whispers in my ear. She pushes on, hearing my intake of breath readying for words, knowing I’m my mother’s own little gabby goose. ‘The sin eater walks among us. Unseen. Unheard,’ she says.
‘But I can see her—’ I hiss.
‘Unseen. Unheard,’ she silences.
I’ve heard sin eaters have branded tongues, but this one hasn’t opened her mouth.
Bessie speaks again. ‘Sins of our flesh become sins of hers through the Eating, praise be. Your mother will fly right up to the heavens, May. Not a sin left to weigh her down.’
I go back and take my place next to my da. His face looks like sheets dropped off at the door for washing, hung with wrinkles that won’t shake out.
‘I’ll wash your face,’ I whisper. ‘I’ll hang it on the line.’
Da gives me the look he always does when I say something that doesn’t seem right. His face widens open as if I’ve just told him good news. ‘What are we ever going to do with you?’
Grapes, red and bursting. A loaf shaped like a bobbin. Crow’s meat. They stick in my mind like porridge in the gullet.
NOW
1. ROAST PIGEON
THE BREAD’S STILL warm under my shawl, my heart echoing through its crust. I run, quick as I can, along the ditch beside the road.
A wide brown nostril swings into my face breathing hot horse breath.
‘Get on!’ calls the cart man, coming from a side lane, urging the mare into the mess of the main thoroughfare. She shuttles her head from side to side, the bit buckling against her yellow teeth. My way’s blocked.
Too visible, I scold, even as I climb out from the ditch onto the flat of the road. I fold my prize into the hollow between my breasts and dart past the baulking horse and a hay wagon.
‘Aye! That’s her!’ the baker yells. I daren’t turn, just break into a run. I go down a narrow lane. At the crossroads I look to one side, hesitate, and go to the other, passing a stable and a smithy. But the baker’s son tailing me doesn’t hesitate. His hand cuffs my neck and knocks me to the ground. The side of my face presses into the mud. I can see the blacksmith’s boots through his open door. My breath comes hard from running. I push the bread up with my hands and rip off the end with my teeth. Might as well eat, the thought comes. If I’m going to the jail, might as well do it with food in my belly.
May Owens. The turnkey calls me out of the cell. Calls me along with the other girls that came in my week. Twenty in all. Three girls who ran away from homes in other towns but don’t have kin here or begging passports. Two whores without the chummage to bribe the constable to turn a blind eye. Five pickpockets. Eight cozeners and worse. One other goodly girl, like me. She killed a stray dog to eat, but turned out it had run off from a lord. Bad luck, that.
We walk in single file out into an early-spring morning heavy with mist. The damp creeps into my bones after the cell, where so many folk made for a comfortable fug. We march down the middle of the road, stopping carts and wagons, making carriage drivers call out in fury. The courthouse is next door, but this is part of our punishment. All the eyes seeing our shame. They shout, calling us wicked women and Eves.
I wish you could show folk your insides the way you show your face. Then they’d know I’m not wicked at all. Or I wish that they’d see my hair and see how it looks just like the Queen’s hair, the same black waves. Then folk would know I am goodly, like her. I am no Eve. Eve wasn’t content to live in the heavenly plains with the Maker. She leapt to earth and sought out Adam, keeper of the fields and orchards, made him lead her to the Maker’s tree and stole its fruit. When she ate all but the last bite, which she fed to Adam, the Maker cursed her for her treachery and sent her to be mistress of the underworld. She’s purest evil. Even worse than Judas, who betrayed the Maker’s son.
The turnkey takes us into a fine building with a roof so high even the tallest of folk couldn’t touch it. We line a bench, twenty shivering girls. I guess some of us are women. I’ve been one for two years, though I don’t know that I feel like one. Then again, I don’t know what a woman is supposed to feel like. I twist my ring. It’s thin and uneven and not real gold, but I like to imagine it is. It’s the only bit left of my da. A token of him.
‘What’s to happen now?’ I ask the dog eater, who’s sitting beside me.
‘Justice takes his decision,’ says a dirty girl a ways down the bench. She stole a silver cup.
‘Recorder is what he’s called,’ the turnkey says.
‘Why a recorder?’ I ask.
‘My fate’s decided,’ says a ratlike girl who tried to sell the bastard she bore, mayhap trying to trade her soiled name away with it.
‘Yeah, but it’s got to be pronounced,’ the dirty one tells the rat.
‘Why is he called a recorder?’ I try again. ‘Does he record what happens?’
The turnkey shushes me.
‘Sounds like donkey paddies to me,’ the rat girl answers softly, an eye rounding the rest of us for nods. The others ignore her, so I drop my eyes too.
‘When does the recorder come?’ I ask the turnkey, but he’s already starting to stand.
The recorder comes in by a side door. He walks to a high wooden table and climbs onto a high wooden chair. He looks for a moment like a child mounting his da’s stool, and the laugh comes before I can stop it. The turnkey and recorder look over sharply, but I deaden my face, and the other girls don’t give me away, even the rat. I feel bad I looked down earlier.
‘Chasy Stow?’ the recorder speaks. The turnkey waves for the girl to stand. ‘Vagrancy and begging without a licence.’