The woman goes on, ‘Nellie’s a ninny who hears a stranger tongue and thinks it a witch’s incantation. Sees no husband and conceives I must be wived to Eve.’ She pauses for coughing. ‘I keep to myself and won’t suffer fools, that’s the only pact I’ve made. My sins are thus: pride, miserliness, wrath, coveting my neighbour’s property, slandering my maid, trying to breed animals of different kinds together, intentionally letting a goose bite my maid.’ I look to the Sin Eater, but she nods along, as if the sins were no more peculiar than forgetting your prayers.

Everyfolk knows the foods for the commoner sins just from living. Parents threaten ‘Don’t make me see herring on your coffin!’ for disobeying. Neighbours gossip about who’ll make the sin eater eat raisins. And of course there’s nursery rhymes:

Jack and Jane went up the lane

To fetch a pail of water,

Jack fell in and couldn’t swim

And Jane had a picnic after.

What did she carry in the hamper

To eat and save Jack’s soul?

A herring, a pickle, a cracker with treacle

And a spoonful of salt in a bowl.

I used to spend hours with Lee parsing out the sins: Jack disobeys his father (herring) by going to the well. He’s prideful (salt) about getting near to the well. He’s lazy (pickle) in not learning to swim. We never agreed on what the cracker with treacle was, but Gracie Manners thought it was an old-fashioned way to say bread (the sin we’re born with). But breeding animals together and setting a goose on your maid? I have no inkling of the foods for them.

All at once the old body’s finished her list. She looks us each hard in the eye, ‘Say your words to end it, sin eaters, but come back not on the morrow for my Eating, nor the day after that, for until Nellie calls the witch finder to prick me with a bodkin or see if I burn, I’ll be here, hale and hearty, sitting a piece in my chair.’

Nellie shuffles us out with one more Maker’s sign across her body.

We go on to two more Recitations and two more Eatings. The Sin Eater feeds me only the tiniest morsels of each food, and I manage not to puke.

On our way back through the town square towards Northside and Dungsbrook, we find folk gathered for a newspanto. We stand in the front, where I’ve never been. Usually I’m hopping up and down behind some burly apprentice hoping for a look at the playacting newsboys, but the older Sin Eater pushes through, folk’s sharp words dying in their throats when they see it’s us.