Then an odd thing happens. A maid comes into the room to dust, as if it were an ordinary day. She finishes one sconce and moves to the mantel. Even at the cunning woman’s Eating there was some feeling. The feeling was guilt felt by miserly neighbours, but it was feeling. Here, none attend the coffin. None cry in the corner. There’s just the maid, going about her duties. I look at the Sin Eater. She’s looking at the food.

Spread on the coffin are some foods I know: mustard seed for lying, gristle for wrath, bitter greens for not saying your prayers. There are also some sins I don’t know: what looks to be a dried crab apple stuffed with mushrooms. But to one side is a sin I know because it’s whispered about in haunting stories told to scare folk. A lamb’s head, stewed in its mother’s milk. Forcing oneself on a child.

I begin to shake again. From somewhere deep. If I knew where my soul lived, I would say it comes from there. The Sin Eater pauses too, but her pause is quick. Then she sits on the stool and eats.

I watch as she works through the mustard seed, crunching the tiny shells. She saves the last several. Holds them out in her hand for me.

I should run. Run out of the door and go back to the jail. Beg to be hung with only my own sins and the few I’ve eaten today to weigh down my soul.

Instead, I stand like a wooden post, so she grabs me easily, pulling me across her body like a child to be spanked. She digs fat fingers into the corners of my lips, and prises my jaws apart. And then she feeds me. Me coughing as the mustard seeds catch in my throat, her holding my mouth and nose until I swallow. Then the stuffed crab apple. Then a slab of lamb’s head she rips apart with her own teeth. Milk dribbles down my chin, down the same curves the puke traced before, the same curves the puke will follow after. She holds my nose and mouth. And, weak, I now know, truly weak, I swallow. I swallow, instead of letting her pinching fingers kill me. I swallow. And now I am what he was. His sin is mine.

3. BREAD

THIS TIME I sit with her, but on an upended split of wood because there’s just the one stool. We’re at her home. She passes the jug. I drink. It doesn’t matter that I’ll puke it up. That seems to be the way of things now. Enough gets in me that my thoughts glaze over now and again before snapping back to our poor, grey truth.

We took it from him, I say to the fire. We should not have done!

Great sobs quake through my ribs. She passes the jug.