A Breath of Snow and Ashes (66 page)

“Where am I?” she said in a quavering voice. Her gaze passed disbelievingly round the room, settling at last on her daughter’s face.

“Mairi?” she said dubiously, and Mrs. Crombie rushed forward and fell on her knees, bursting into tears as she gripped her mother’s hands.

“A Màthair! A Màthair!”
she cried. The old woman set a trembling hand on her daughter’s hair, looking as though she were not quite sure she was real.

I, meanwhile, had been doing my best to check the old lady’s vital signs, which were not all that vital, but nonetheless fairly good for someone who had been dead a moment before. Respiration very shallow, labored, a color like week-old oatmeal, cold, clammy skin despite the heat in the room, and I couldn’t find a pulse at all—though plainly she must have one. Mustn’t she?

“How do you feel?” I asked.

She put a trembling hand to her belly.

“I do feel that wee bit poorly,” she whispered.

I put my own hand on her abdomen, and felt it instantly. A pulse, where no pulse should be. It was irregular, stumbling, and bumping—but most assuredly there.

“Jesus H. Roosevelt Christ,” I said. I didn’t say it loudly, but Mrs. Crombie gasped, and I saw her apron twitch, as she doubtless made the horns beneath it.

I hadn’t time to bother with apology, but stood and grabbed Roger by the sleeve, pulling him aside.

“She has an aortic aneurysm,” I said to him very softly. “She must have been bleeding internally for some time, enough to make her lose consciousness and seem cold. It’s going to rupture
very
soon, and then she’ll die for real.”

He swallowed audibly, his face very pale, but said only, “Do you know how long?”

I glanced at Mrs. Wilson; her face was the same gray as the snow-laden sky, and her eyes were going in and out of focus like the flickering of a candle in a wind.

“I see,” Roger said, though I hadn’t spoken. He took a deep breath and cleared his throat.

The crowd, which had been hissing amongst themselves like a flock of agitated geese, ceased at once. Every eye in the place was riveted on the tableau before them.

“This our sister has been restored to life, as we all shall be one day by the grace of God,” Roger said softly. “It is a sign to us, of hope and faith. She will go soon again to the arms of the angels, but has come back to us for a moment, to bring us assurance of God’s love.” He paused a moment, obviously groping for something further to say. He cleared his throat and bent his head toward Mrs. Wilson’s.

“Did you . . . wish to say anything, O, mother?” he whispered in Gaelic.

“Aye, I do.” Mrs. Wilson seemed to be gaining strength—and with it, indignation. A faint pinkness showed in her waxy cheeks as she glared round at the crowd.

“What sort of wake is
this,
Hiram Crombie?” she demanded, fixing her son-in-law with a gimlet eye. “I see nay food laid out, nay drink—and what is this?” Her voice rose in a furious squeak, her eye having fallen on the plate of bread and salt, which Roger had hastily set aside when he lifted her.

“Why—” She looked wildly round at the assembled crowd, and the truth of it dawned upon her. Her sunken eyes bulged. “Why . . . ye shameless skinflint! This is nay wake at all! Ye’ve meant to bury me wi’ nothing but a crust o’ bread and a drap o’ wine for the sin-eater, and a wonder ye spared
that
! Nay doot ye’ll thieve the winding claes from my corpse to make cloots for your snotty-nosed bairns, and where’s my good brooch I said I wanted to be buried with?” One scrawny hand closed on her shrunken bosom, catching a fistful of wilted linen.

“Mairi! My brooch!”

“Here it is, Mother, here it is!” Poor Mrs. Crombie, altogether undone, was fumbling in her pocket, sobbing and gasping. “I put it away to be safe—I meant to put it on ye before—before . . .” She came out with an ugly lump of garnets, which her mother snatched from her, cradling it against her breast, and glaring round with jealous suspicion. Clearly she suspected her neighbors of waiting the chance to steal it from her body; I heard an offended inhalation from the woman standing behind me, but had no time to turn and see who it was.

“Now, now,” I said, using my best soothing bedside manner. “I’m sure everything will be all right.”
Aside from the fact that you’re going to die in the next few minutes, that is,
I thought, suppressing a hysterical urge to laugh inappropriately. Actually, it might be in the next few seconds, if her blood pressure rose any higher.

I had my fingers on the thumping big pulse in her abdomen that betrayed the fatal weakening of her abdominal aorta. It had to have begun to leak already, to make her lose consciousness to such a degree as to seem dead. Eventually, she would simply blow a gasket, and that would be it.

Roger and Jamie were both doing their best to soothe her, muttering in English and Gaelic and patting her comfortingly. She seemed to be responding to this treatment, though still breathing like a steam engine.

Jamie’s production of the bottle of whisky from his pocket helped still further.

“Well, that’s more like it!” Mrs. Wilson said, somewhat mollified, as he hastily pulled the cork and waved the bottle under her nose so she could appreciate the quality of it. “And ye’ve brought food, too?” Mrs. Bug had bustled her way to the front, basket held before her like a battering ram. “Hmph! I never thought I should live to see Papists kinder than my ain kin!” This last was directed at Hiram Crombie, who had so far been opening and closing his mouth, without finding anything whatever to say in reply to his mother-in-law’s tirade.

“Why . . . why . . .” he stammered in outrage, torn between shock, obvious fury, and a need to justify himself before his neighbors. “Kinder than your ain kin! Why, have I not given ye a hame, these twenty years past? Fed and clothed ye as ye were my ain mither? B-borne your wicked tongue and foul t-tempers for
years,
and never—”

Jamie and Roger both leapt in to try to stifle him, but instead interrupted each other, and in the confusion, Hiram was allowed to go on speaking his mind, which he did. So did Mrs. Wilson, who was no slouch at invective, either.

The pulse in her belly was throbbing under my hand, and I was hard put to it to keep her from leaping off the table and dotting Hiram with the bottle of whisky. The neighbors were agog.

Roger took matters—and Mrs. Wilson—firmly into his own hands, seizing her by her scrawny shoulders.

“Mrs. Wilson,” he said hoarsely, but loudly enough to drown Hiram’s indignant rebuttal of Mrs. Wilson’s most recent depiction of his character. “Mrs. Wilson!”

“Eh?” She paused for breath, blinking up at him in momentary confusion.

“Cease. And you, too!” He glared at Hiram, who was opening his mouth again. Hiram shut it.

“I’ll no have this,” Roger said, and thumped the Bible down on the table. “It’s not fitting, and I’ll not have it, d’ye hear me?” He glowered from one to the other of the combatants, black brows low and fierce.

The room was silent, bar Hiram’s heavy breathing, Mrs. Crombie’s small sobs, and Mrs. Wilson’s faint, asthmatic wheeze.

“Now, then,” Roger said, still glaring round to prevent any further interruptions. He put a hand over Mrs. Wilson’s thin, age-spotted one.

“Mrs. Wilson—d’ye not ken that you stand before God this minute?” He darted a look at me, and I nodded; yes, she was definitely going to die. Her head was wobbling on her neck and the glow of anger fading from her eyes, even as he spoke.

“God is near to us,” he said, lifting his head to address the congregation at large. He repeated this in Gaelic, and there was a sort of collective sigh. He narrowed his eyes at them.

“We will not profane this holy occasion with anger nor bitterness. Now—sister.” He squeezed her hand gently. “Compose your soul. God will—”

But Mrs. Wilson was no longer listening. Her withered mouth dropped open in horror.

“The sin-eater!” she cried, looking wildly round. She grabbed the dish from the table next to her, showering salt down the front of her winding-sheet. “Where is the sin-eater?”

Hiram stiffened as though goosed with a red-hot poker, then whirled and fought his way toward the door, the crowd giving way before him. Murmurs of speculation rose in his wake, only to stop abruptly as a piercing wail rose from outside, another rising behind it as the first one fell.

An awed “oooh!” rose from the crowd, and Mrs. Wilson looked gratified, as the
bean-treim
started in to earn their money in earnest.

Then there was a stirring near the door, and the crowd parted like the Red Sea, leaving a narrow path to the table. Mrs. Wilson sat bolt upright, dead-white and barely breathing. The pulse in her abdomen skittered and jumped under my fingers. Roger and Jamie had hold of her arms, supporting her.

A complete hush had fallen over the room; the only sounds were the howling of the
bean-treim
—and slow, shuffling footsteps, soft on the ground outside, then suddenly louder on the boards of the floor. The sin-eater had arrived.

He was a tall man, or had been, once. It was impossible to tell his age; either years or illness had eaten away his flesh, so that his wide shoulders bowed and his spine had hunched, a gaunt head poking forward, crowned with a balding straggle of graying strands.

I glanced up at Jamie, eyebrows raised. I had never seen the man before. He shrugged slightly; he didn’t know him, either. As the sin-eater came closer, I saw that his body was crooked; he seemed caved in on one side, ribs perhaps crushed by some accident.

Every eye was fixed on the man, but he met none of them, keeping his gaze focused on the floor. The path to the table was narrow, but the people shrank back as he passed, careful that he should not touch them. Only when he reached the table did he lift his head, and I saw that one eye was missing, evidently clawed away by a bear, judging from the welted mass of scar tissue.

The other one was working; he halted in surprise, seeing Mrs. Wilson, and glanced round, obviously unsure what to do next.

She wiggled one arm free of Roger’s grip and pushed the dish containing the bread and salt toward him.

“Get on, then,” she said, her voice high and a little frightened.

“But you’re not dead.” It was a soft, educated voice, betraying only puzzlement, but the crowd reacted as though it had been the hissing of a serpent, and recoiled further, if such a thing were possible.

“Well, what of it?” Agitation was making Mrs. Wilson tremble even more; I could feel a small constant vibration through the table. “Ye’ve been paid to eat my sins—be after doing it, then!” A thought occurred to her and she jerked upright, squinting at her son-in-law. “Ye
did
pay him, Hiram?”

Hiram was still flushed from the previous exchanges, but went a sort of puce at this, and clutched his side—clutching at his purse, I thought, rather than his heart.

“Well, I’m no going to pay him
before
he’s done the job,” he snapped. “What sort of way is that to be carrying on?”

Seeing renewed riot about to break out, Jamie let go his hold on Mrs. Wilson and fumbled hastily in his sporran, emerging with a silver shilling, which he thrust across the table toward the sin-eater—though careful, I saw, not to touch the man.

“Now ye’ve been paid,” he said gruffly, nodding to him. “Best be about your business, sir.”

The man looked slowly round the room, and the intake of breath from the crowd was audible, even over the wails of “WOOOOOOOOOOOEEEE to the house of CROMMMMBIIIEEEEEE” going on outside.

He was standing no more than a foot away from me, close enough that I could smell the sweet-sour odor of him: ancient sweat and dirt in his rags, and something else, some faint aroma that spoke of pustulant sores and unhealed wounds. He turned his head and looked straight at me. It was a soft brown eye, amber in color, and startlingly like my own. Meeting his gaze gave me a queer feeling in the pit of the stomach, as though I looked for a moment into a distorting mirror, and saw that cruelly misshapen face replace my own.

He did not change expression, and yet I felt something nameless pass between us. Then he turned his head away, and reached out a long, weathered, very dirty hand to pick up the piece of bread.

A sort of sigh went through the room as he ate—slowly gumming the bread, for he had few teeth. I could feel Mrs. Wilson’s pulse, much lighter now, and fast, like a hummingbird’s. She hung nearly limp in the men’s grasp, the withered lids of her eyes drooping as she watched.

He wrapped both hands around the cup of wine, as though it were a chalice, and drank it down, eyes closed. He set the empty cup down and looked at Mrs. Wilson, curiously. I supposed he never had met one of his clients alive before, and wondered how long he had fulfilled this strange office.

Mrs. Wilson stared into his eyes, face blank as a child’s. Her abdominal pulse was skipping like a stone, a few light beats, a pause, then a thump that struck my palm like a blow, and back to its erratic jumps.

The sin-eater bowed to her, very slowly. Then he turned round, and scampered for the door, with amazing speed for such an infirm specimen.

Several of the boys and younger men near the door rushed out after him, yelling; one or two seized sticks of wood from the fire basket by the hearth. Others were torn; they glanced toward the open door, where shouts and the thumps of thrown stones mingled with the wailing of the
bean-treim
—but their eyes were drawn back ineluctably to Mrs. Wilson.

She looked . . . peaceful, was the only word. It was no surprise whatever to feel the pulse beneath my hand simply stop. Somewhere deeper, in my own depths, I felt the dizzying rush of the hemorrhage begin, a flooding warmth that pulled me into it, made black spots whirl before my eyes, and caused a ringing in my ears. I knew to all intents and purposes she had now died for good. I felt her go. And yet I heard her voice above the racket, very small but calm and clear.

“I forgive ye, Hiram,” she said. “Ye’ve been a good lad.”

My vision had gone dark, but I could still hear and sense things dimly. Something grasped me, pulled me away, and a moment later I came to myself, leaning against Jamie in a corner, his arms supporting me.