What Dread Hand? by Christianna Brand

Author:Christianna Brand [Brand, Christianna]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-1-4532-9044-6
Publisher: MysteriousPress.com/Open Road
Published: 2013-01-15T22:37:00+00:00

10

The Sins of the Fathers…

(Sin-eaters flourished in Wales, especially along the English border, up to the end of the seventeenth century; but, though less common, they continued long after that, possibly up to as little as a hundred years ago.)

The night was dark but the wind that rustled the stunted branches of the scrub oak in the hanging forest was balmy and warm; it was not against the cold that the rider hugged his jacket so close about him, slipping down from the saddle, walking forward, reluctant and slow, towards that ruined place. It had been a small cottage once, cosy and warm; but the years of desertion had let in the wild rain among the stones that formed its simple walls, softening the clay that bound them, tumbling-in the blue-grey slates of the roof, opening wider the wide chimney to the heaped and mountainous twigs of the jackdaws’ nests, almost as long abandoned as the place itself…

Yet, where nowadays not even the jackdaws built, there came from the unglassed window a glimmer of light, and at the sound of the pony’s hooves, unshod, on the grass outside, someone came to the door and a woman’s voice called—though faintly: ‘Who’s there?’

He stopped, shivering, clutching across his breast the edges of his coat as though the close-woven wool of his own mountain sheep might hold some magic to keep his body from harm; and, without preamble or greeting, called back in their native Welsh: ‘I come for the sin-eater.’

‘Then you may go back,’ she said. ‘He cannot come.’

‘Not come?’ There was sickness abroad, many were dead, the sin-eaters were being kept busy. He grew anxious, urgent, coming closer, the pony’s single rein looped over his arm. ‘He must come! I’ve been searching three days, I can get nobody else. The sin-eater from Tregarron himself is sick, the one at Cilycwm died yesterday…’

‘I did not know,’ she said; and in her voice there seemed the faint echo of a new despair.

He was hardly surprised. ‘Living so isolated here—’

She interrupted bitterly. ‘All sin-eaters live isolated. Our men take your sins upon them, and for that you cast them out.’

He shrugged. Who would wish to associate with such as they?—men pre-doomed for all eternity, heavy with the load of other men’s transgressions. ‘We pay. And there is—a good meal.’

A good meal—the worse the sinner, the better the banquet. They spread out the food upon the dead man’s bosom, and from there you ate the meal and with it the dead man’s sins. And the dead, made innocent again, went directly to glory; and you were paid and kicked out to live a pariah, till they had need of you again. ‘At any rate,’ said the woman, turning back into the doorway, ‘my man is sick, he can’t come.’

He dared not go back without a sin-eater. ‘I can get no one else. The time is passing, my master must be buried tomorrow, the mistress is distraught lest he go to the grave with his sins still upon him.

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