'Don't look, Lillian. Never look into the eyes of a Sin-Eater, you will be as cursed as he is and will forever languish in darkness.'
Lillian Elmes remembers the warning her mother gave her about the town's Sin-Eater only too well.
How could she n...
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I am her now – ten-year-old Lily, the pale girl with ringlets, confined to her bed, the one who sought desperately for answers about what she had seen and heard, and was told in no uncertain terms that it was a closed matter. That the things she had witnessed should be forgotten, cast aside to burn in the hearth.
'You were right, Mr. Carver,' I say. 'I did not come here to just bring you apples. When we were children, you came to my home. My mother warned me not to look upon you, but I did and whatever passed between us left me bedridden and sickening for days. What I saw then has never left me. And then, that day at Lutwyche Hall, I know you saw me. Oh, you can say that you did not, but I know it, just as I know that something awful happened to me – something that terrified my dear friend, Lizzie, and not much terrifies her, let me tell you. Then there are the things I have seen today...'
Whatever he sees in my expression, Mr, Carver sighs again, the whole act releasing a tension in his shoulders and he sinks into the chair almost as if his body moulds to it. How easily he seems to carry himself here. So utterly opposed to that stiff, awkward creature I saw at Mr. Hawkstone's ceremony.
'Very well,' he says. 'Ask.'
Ask, he says. But where to start?
'Am I cursed, Mr. Carver?'
He smiles then, just a small turn of his mouth, but it bothers me so that he would think my question amusing in some way.
'Are you so dewy-eyed, Miss Elmes that you believe everything your mother tells you?'
My skin instantly prickles. 'The Sin-Eater's curse is not a tale from my mother alone! There is not a townsperson alive who would look upon a Sin-Eater. They all believe in the curse.'
'Oh, well, in that case, if they all believe it, then it must be true.'
Mr. Carver grips the arms of the chair, scratching his fingertips at the worn fabric and I wonder how many times he has sat there, picking at the old chair. How long will it be before he pulls it apart completely?
'Allow me to let you in on a secret, Miss, and while I hate to disperse any rumours about my apparent powers, because it does afford me some notoriety, I am completely unable to bewitch anyone the way in which they say. I can no more curse you than I can curse a toad in a pond. They are afflicted, not by dark powers, but by shame. They are willing to pay scant for my services, but not willing to admit that they are involved in something their Church condemns. They call upon me, but then insist I hide myself away as if I do not exist. I am nothing more than their loathsome dark secret. If they do not look upon me, it is because they do not wish to see their own faces staring back. It is not I that curse the people, but their own guilt.'
I blink at his words, stunned. This cannot be true, can it? Mama seemed so sure of the curse. So utterly terrified of it. 'But I did look at you and afterwards...'
