The Sin-Eater's House

The Keys

I clear the houses of the dead for a living. That is the polite way to put it. The cards I had printed say Estate Clearance & House Reset, discretion assured, because what people are really buying when they hire me is not the labour. Anyone can fill a skip. What they want is to come back to a clean floor and a neutral smell and not have to be the one who decides which of their mother's saucepans is worth keeping. I decide. I am good at it. I have cleared rooms where a man died alone and lay a month before the milk on the step gave him away, and rooms so neat you would swear the owner had only gone to post a letter, and the longer I do it the more I think those are the same room. Absence is absence. My job is to make it look like order, so the living can call it grief instead of relief and go home.

So when the solicitor's letter came about Bield House, I read it as I read all of them. As work.

The letter said that a Miss Hester Crewe, of Bield House, in the parish of Threlfen, had died intestate, that the deceased had no issue, and that searches had identified me as the nearest surviving relative through my late mother. Your great-aunt, the solicitor had written, in the careful tone of a man telling you that you have inherited a problem. I had not known I had a great-aunt. My mother had been a woman with the doors of her own life kept shut, and the Crewe side was a room I had never been let into. I had a single photograph: a thin woman in a doorway, squinting, hand up against the sun or the camera. On the back, in my mother's writing, one word. Hester. No date. No love.

The Slack is two hundred miles north of where I live and a hundred years back from anywhere. You leave the motorway, then the A-road, then the B-road, then a road with grass growing up the centre of it like a parting in wet hair, and the moor closes over you. It had been raining since the county line, the particular rain of high country that does not fall so much as hang, and by the time I came down into the valley the light was the colour of dishwater and the sheep stood in it with the patience of stones.

Threlfen was a church, a chapel turned into a house, a shop that was also the post office, and a public house called the Drovers with one car outside it. I had meant to go straight up to the house, but the solicitor held the keys, and the solicitor — a Mr. Brisco, of Brisco & Hart, which I suspected was Mr. Brisco and a filing cabinet — kept an office above the shop that smelled of paraffin and old paper.

He was older than his letter. He had laid the keys on the desk before I sat down, three of them on a loop of garden twine, as though he had wanted them off his hands.

"You'll be Ada's girl," he said. Not a question. He looked at me the way the village would go on looking at me, as if my face were a door they recognised but did not want opened.

"Maren Tasker."

"Tasker." He turned the name over like a coin he wasn't sure of. "You favour her. Hester, I mean. About the eyes."

I did not tell him I had no idea what Hester's eyes had looked like, beyond a squint in a doorway. I asked the questions I always ask. Was the house connected to power — yes, a meter, prepaid. Water — a spring, gravity-fed, never failed. Had anyone been in since the death — no. Had the death been at the house — he hesitated, then said the home help had found her in her chair, that it had been quick, that she'd been ninety-one and it was a mercy, and he said mercy the way you put a stone on a piece of paper so the wind won't take it.

"There's no rush on the clearance," he said, which is a thing the bereaved say and never the lawyers. "But you'll want to be done before the bad weather. The lane drifts."

"I'll be done in a fortnight."

He looked at me again with that recognising, reluctant look. "Folk hereabouts," he began, and then chose his words like a man stepping between bogs. "Folk hereabouts called it the Sin-Eater's. The house. You'll hear it. I'd not set store by it."

"By what?"

"By any of it," he said, and pushed the keys across the desk the last inch, so that I had to take them to stop them falling.

The lane to Bield House climbed out of the village along the side of the Slack and then dropped into a fold of the moor where you would not know a house was until you were on it. It sat with its back to the hill and its face to the long grey miles, a low stone farmhouse with a slate roof gone green at the north end and small deep windows like a face that has learned to give nothing away. A byre leaned off one gable. There was a garden, walled, with the black skeletons of cabbages standing in it, and a gate, and on the gate, cut into the wood and gone soft with weather, two letters and a word I would only later understand. The rain had stopped without my noticing. The valley was so quiet I could hear my own ears.

I am not a fanciful woman. I want that on the record, since what comes after will make me sound like one. I have stood in the kitchens of the recently and badly dead and felt nothing but the arithmetic of bags and hours. I parked the van, took my torch and my clipboard and my roll of bin liners, and let myself in through the back, into the porch with its row of cold pegs, and through the inner door into the kitchen, and that is where I first smelled it.

Bread.

Warm bread, the yeasty animal smell of a loaf an hour out of the oven, so thick and present that my mouth made water before my mind had finished refusing it. The kitchen was cold. The range was dead, its iron the temperature of the room, no warmth in it at all when I laid my hand to it. There was no bread. There was no one who could have baked it. The woman who had lived here had been dead three weeks and in the ground a fortnight, and the house smelled as though she had just that moment slid a loaf onto the rack to cool, and the smell wrapped round me in the doorway like arms.

I told myself: damp, mice, the particular rot of an old house, the brain making patterns. I have a hundred such sentences. I said them.

Then I turned to the long table under the window, and I saw that it was laid.

Not laid as a kitchen is left when someone dies in their chair. Laid. A place set at the head of the table and a place set at its foot. Two plates, white, old, with a thin gold line round the rim and a chip out of one. A bowl at each setting. A knife and a spoon at each, the spoons turned face-down the way the old people do it. A loaf on a board in the middle, whole, uncut, with a knife laid across it. A dish of salt. A jug. Two cups. Everything squared and patient and waiting, set for a meal that two people were about to sit down to, in a house where for three weeks no one had been alive to sit.

The home help, I thought. Mr. Brisco. Someone laid it and forgot. There is always a someone. I made myself walk to the table. I made myself touch the loaf, because the loaf was the lie I most needed to break, and the loaf was soft. Fresh. The crust gave under my thumb and sprang back. I picked it up — heavier than it looked, warm at its heart, the warmth of bread that has cooled most of the way but not all — and I stood there in a dead woman's kitchen holding a warm loaf that could not be warm, and the smell of it filled my throat, and from somewhere in the house, or somewhere in me, came the clear cold thought, in a voice that was almost my mother's:

Sit down. You must be hungry, after the road.

I put the loaf back on its board. I went out to the van and I sat in it with both hands on the wheel until the trembling in them stopped, which took longer than I will admit, and I told myself the thing I would go on telling myself for some days yet, which was that I was tired, that I had been driving since dawn, that grief does strange things even to people who feel none, and that in the morning, in daylight, the kitchen would only be a kitchen, and the bread would be a heel of stale rye left by a forgetful old woman, and I would bin it, and I would get on.

I did not sleep at the house that night. I drove back down to the Drovers and took a room, and the landlord gave me the key and did not ask which house, because in a place that small he already knew, and when I said good night he said it back with his eyes somewhere over my shoulder, the way you speak to someone standing next to a thing you would rather not look at.