What Dread Hand? (16 page)

She bent all her strength to uphold her will against his. ‘Yes. You must go.’

‘And bring the food back? Bring it here?’ It was dreadful to see the gentle face lose its innocence, the dawn of idiot cunning in his eyes. ‘But not for myself, Mother? Isn’t that it?’

‘The money—’

‘I don’t want the money,’ he said. ‘But the food…’ His thin arm hugged the aching emptiness of his belly.

‘I don’t want the food,’ she said. ‘It’s not for me. I shall not touch one crumb of it, not one crumb…’ But she could not prevent the turn of her anguished heart towards that inner room where her man lay moaning: the turn of her anxious eyes. The boy said: ‘Ah, no—not for you. For him!’

‘You shall eat it all,’ she said; and bent her head guiltily, not meeting the return of his innocent, foolish faith and joy.

He went with the farm servant: trembling. His mother having thrown a woollen shawl about his head and shoulders, the man saw only the old-young face, hooded, and the wild white hair. But the widow, meeting them at the farmhouse door, held her lantern high and cried out: ‘What is this you have brought me? This is no sin-eater, this is a boy.’

‘He can eat as well as another, I suppose,’ said the man. But he was abashed at having been tricked, sought further to rehabilitate himself. ‘Better, perhaps. A boy is young and strong to bear the burden of the sins.’

‘Do you call this strong?’ she said, pushing the boy before her into the lighted kitchen, turning the poor, thin, zany face to hers. You could see her heart sink within her. ‘And as for young—is this poor child to take on the evil of a grown man’s whole days?’

‘He is the sin-eater,’ said the man, shrugging. ‘Let him eat.’ He threw himself down on the high-backed oak settle at the open hearth where, despite the oppressive heat of the night, a fire sputtered and sparked. ‘At any rate, there’s no other. I have searched three days; and, as it is, have had to walk all this way while he rode my horse—
and
hold him on, half the time, from tumbling off.’

‘He is weak,’ said the woman, and looked at him pityingly.

‘I am hungry,’ said the boy.

The corpse was laid out in the little parlour where candlelight glowed from the tall dresser with its rows of gold lustre jugs. A white sheet was pulled up to the chin, a china dish balanced upon the dead breast; and heaped on the dish was food, thick slices of bacon, pink and glistening white, cut from the home-cured joints that hung from the beams in the kitchen ceiling; brown faggots, home-made also, aromatic with herbs; eggs boiled and shelled, raw onions sliced across, fresh-baked bread, spread thinly with the butter that the farmhouse wives so salted that the hired servants would not take too much of it: great wedges of cake, dark and sticky; slabs of crumbling white cheese… The boy stood looking at it and slavered at the jaws.

The family, hastily summoned, crowded in after him and stood with bent heads round the bier; the old, accustomed, calm—the young shying like frightened ponies in the candle-light that flickered in the shadows so that, beneath its shroud, the body seemed to move. They waited for the boy to speak.

The boy could not speak. His heart was like water within him, his mouth drooled saliva at the sight of the food. An old man said at last: ‘Shall we not begin?’

The widow had protected his youth from their scrutiny, keeping him in shadow, muffling his old-young face again into its woollen shawl. Too late now to find another; she had done her best—she wanted no argument. She prompted him, murmuring, fearful, the opening words of the sin-eater’s terrible prayer.

He had heard his father rehearsing it often enough—the sibilant muttering, the pauses while the food was gobbled down, bit by ceremonious bit, the crescendo of importunity, storming heaven, the shriek of horror, real or pretended, as the prayer at last was answered, the sins transmitted to the living from the dead: the precipitate flight, eerily wailing, staying only to pick up the money, by custom flung after the outcast into the farmyard mire. But the words… The howl of a fox he could imitate so that the vixen cried back to him, the hoot of an owl, the scream of the kite, but these sounds had no words; he knew no words… He began to mumble, desperate—imitating, apelike, a meaningless babel of sound. They shifted their feet uneasily—only half listening, only half watching him, afraid of the moment to come, part of that moment and yet wishing to be no part of it, giving him, deliberately, only a divided attention; yet conscious, and with a growing consciousness, that all was not as it should be. The widow made small, urgent, hidden gestures towards the body. The time had come to eat.

The butter was yellow in the candle-light, gleaming gold sovereigns of it ringing the brown batch loaves; his bowels melted within him, inside his mouth, his cheeks seemed to sweat saliva. He stretched out a shaking hand towards the food…

But his mother’s voice hissed in his ear: ‘Not one scrap, not one crumb!’ His hand dropped back.

She had counselled him, feverishly coaching him in the part he must play, knowing him not capable of improvisation. Now, obedient, he stumbled through the simple sentences. ‘You must all go. I am one that eats alone.’

The old men were astonished, protesting. ‘The sin-eater eats before witnesses.’

The boy repeated: ‘I am one that eats alone.’

‘Witnesses must be present to see it, when the sin passes.’

‘You shall hear it,’ said the boy.

The shriek of mortal terror, the terrible wailing… ‘If we stand in the next room,’ urged the widow, abetting him, ‘we shall hear when the sin passes.’ The sin-eater was not as other sin-eaters, in her heart she doubted his efficacy but he was the best she could do, her husband must be buried tomorrow, she prayed again for no argument; and meanwhile, uneasy but indomitable, drove them all out, reluctantly shuffling, into the kitchen next door.

Ears pressed against oak, they heard the mutterings again wordless, unmeaning. Then silence. The boy, obedient, was stuffing his threadbare pockets with the food, was lining the torn shirt with it, close up against his naked body, fat against thin—white, glossy fat pressed close against the hard rib-caging that painfully ridged the blue-white skin… The faggots, crushed by the all-concealing shawl, exploded dry and mealy, aromatically fragrant, the hard whites of the eggs were slippery and cold; pressed between narrow oval slices of bread, the butter oozed and melted, yellow as gold. He set up a shrill chanting, importuning heaven in a stream of wordless sound, for the shifting to himself of the dead man’s sins.

When we hear the scream, said the old men, avidly listening, it will be the sin passing.

The chanting ceased. Within the little parlour the boy was nerving himself for the screaming. There was nothing for him to scream for, he had not eaten the food, the sins would not pass to him: and yet he must somehow open his mouth and, weak and sick as he was, find the strength to begin. In its corner, the grandfather clock ticked away the minutes, urgently; pale against dark gold of old lustre, the candle-light flickered from the tall oak dresser; uneasily the dead man lay, shifting beneath his shroud with the shifting of the shadows. On the still breast, the dish lay empty.

His mouth opened, he dragged up a deep breath from his labouring lungs; lurched, sick and trembling against the bier, knowing that he had no strength, no power, no will to meet the task before him—crouched there, shuddering, and did not know how to start screaming…

But the lurch against the bier had shifted the weight of the dish, tipped it crazily, unbalanced now as it was by the loss of the food. He saw the beginning of the slow slide, impeded by the folds of the shroud, but inevitable nevertheless; and flung out a hand to save it. His fingers grasped it, he hung over the corpse clinging to the edge of the dish; but, heavy and greasy with bacon fat, it slid inexorably out of his hands and a moment later had crashed into a thousand fragments on to the scrubbed white stone of the floor…

He let out one startled yell: the door burst open, they all stood gaping: and, hysterically screaming, he thrust his way through them and was out—out into the night air, under the stars and fleeing down the mountain-side to the place he called his home. If they flung gold after him, if the servant recollected his promise of safe conduct, he waited for neither. After the long strain of the night, panic had him fast; and, faint with lack of food, he yet rushed on and on, stumbling through the hanging forests, across the rough grassland, plunging through the river, waist high, through scrub oak again and so at last collapsed, sobbing, outside the ruined cottage, at his mother’s feet.

She could not wait even to comfort or assist him. She burst out: ‘Have you brought the food?’

He dragged himself to his feet, painfully; began to unwrap the shawl, to extract from beneath it the poor, battered remnants of that once splendid feast—the crumbled faggots, the split and bulging eggs, the fine white bacon fat gone limp and greasy now from long contact with the sweating body. She took it from him, silently, piece by piece, scraped with a cupped palm the melting butter from the hollow of his waist, scraped it off again on to a crust of bread. She said at last: ‘Is this all of it?’

All of it. Not one morsel eaten, not one crumb. His heart rose, light as a bird at the thought of it—the mission accomplished, temptation resisted, the reward, untarnished, now to come. But the cunning crept back, frightened, defensive, as she took the food and turned away into the house. ‘Where are you taking it? It’s mine, you promised.’ Famished, exhausted, he began to drag himself after her. ‘You’re not going to eat it yourself? You’re not giving it all to him…?’

‘You shall have it,’ she promised. ‘All of it. All of it.’ The sins of the simple farmer—what are they? An ounce of mutton underweight, a drop or two of water in the milk; a woman coveted, a word in anger, a curse, a blow… But the sins of the sin-eater—the long accumulation of sin upon sin, of sins unrepented, unshriven, unforgiven, of sins stolen from dead men’s souls for gain: who shall take on the sins of the sin-eater?

She had known all along that he was at the point of death; and now the mother came out and took her son’s hand and led him, innocent, through to the inner room where the father lay: with the food spread out upon his naked breast.

‘Y
ES, I THINK I
may claim,’ said the Grand Old Man (of Detection) complacently, ‘that in all my career I never failed to solve a murder case. In the end,’ he added, hurriedly, having caught Inspector Cockrill’s beady eye.

Inspector Cockrill had for the past hour found himself in the position of the small boy at a party who knows how the conjurer does his tricks. He suggested: ‘The
Othello
case?’ and sat back and twiddled his thumbs.

‘As in the
Othello
case,’ said the Great Detective, as though he had not been interrupted at all. ‘Which, as I say, I solved. In the end,’ he added again, looking defiantly at Inspector Cockrill.

‘But too late?’ suggested Cockie: regretfully.

The great one bowed. ‘In as far as certain evidence had, shall we say?—faded—yes: too late. For the rest, I unmasked the murderer: I built up a water-tight case against him: and I duly saw him triumphantly brought to trial. In other words, I think I may fairly say—that I solved the case.’

‘Only, the jury failed to convict,’ said Inspector Cockrill.

He waved it aside with magnificence. A detail. ‘As it happened, yes; they failed to convict.’

‘And quite right too,’ said Cockie; he was having a splendid time.

‘People round me were remarking, that second time I saw him play Othello,’ said the Great Detective, ‘that James Dragon had aged twenty years in as many days. And so he may well have done; for in the past three weeks he had played, night after night, to packed audiences—night after night strangling his new Desdemona, in the knowledge that his own wife had been so strangled but a few days before; and that every man Jack in the audience believed it was he who had strangled her—believed he was a murderer.’

‘Which, however, he was not,’ said Inspector Cockrill, and his bright elderly eyes shone with malicious glee.

‘Which he was—and was not,’ said the old man heavily. He was something of an actor himself but he had not hitherto encountered the modern craze for audience-participation and he was not enjoying it at all. ‘If I might now be permitted to continue without interruption…?’

‘Some of you may have seen James Dragon on the stage,’ said the old man, ‘though the company all migrated to Hollywood in the end. But none of you will have seen him as Othello—after that season, Dragon Productions dropped it from their repertoire. They were a great theatrical family—still are, come to that, though James and Leila, his sister, are the only ones left nowadays; and as for poor James—getting very
passé,
very
passé
indeed,’ said the Great Detective pityingly, shaking his senile head.

‘But at the time of the murder, he was in his prime; not yet thirty and at the top of his form. And he was splendid. I see him now as I saw him that night, the very night she died—towering over her as she lay on the great stage bed, tricked out in his tremendous costume of black and gold, with the padded chest and shoulders concealing his slenderness and the great padded, jewel-studded sleeves like cantaloupe melons, raised above his head: bringing them down, slowly, slowly, until suddenly he swooped like a hawk and closed his dark-stained hands on her white throat. And I hear again Emilia’s heart-break cry in the lovely Dragon family voice: “Oh, thou hast killed the sweetest innocent, That e’er did lift up eye…”’

But she had not been an innocent—James Dragon’s Desdemona, Glenda Croy, who was in fact his wife. She had been a thoroughly nasty piece of work. An aspiring young actress, she had blackmailed him into marriage for the sake of her career; and that had been all of a piece with her conduct throughout. A great theatrical family was extremely sensitive to blackmail even in those more easy-going days of the late nineteen-twenties; and in the first rush of the Dragons’ spectacular rise to fame, there had been one or two unfortunate episodes, one of them even culminating in a—very short—prison sentence: which, however, had effectively been hushed up. By the time of the murder, the Dragons were a byword for a sort of magnificent un-touchability. Glenda Croy, without ever unearthing more than a grubby little scandal here and there, could yet be the means of dragging them all back into the mud again.