'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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This cannot be Lizzie. It cannot.
This thing, this creature, it cannot be Elizabeth Jane Darby. The woman who brought a spark of light to every room. The woman who turned the heads of men who desired her and the heads of women who admired her.
Her hair – once beautiful, wild red locks – has been shorn close to her scalp. Sore, reddened patches pockmark her skull as if she had attempted to tear the hair from its roots before it was taken from her. Her skin, always pale but enviable in that English rose way, looks sallow and dry. Only her lips seem to bring any colour to her face where they are swollen and reddened, where she has chewed at them.
No, this is not the Lizzie that I knew. This is someone else. Something else.
It is in her eyes, however, that I see her. Not the woman I adored, but a broken thing, a wraith, but I see her there, nonetheless. I see pain. Suffering. Desperation. But, what of madness?
'Will you sit, Lily?' she whispers.
I look to Daniel, who nods with reassurance, and so I sit, at the chair opposite her and he stands at my shoulder. Ever-present. Ever-comforting.
Oh, how many things I had planned to say to her! How I had wanted to come here and rage at her and ask, why why, why! Yet now, sitting here with this pitiful, tortured thing in front of me, I am lost of words. In fact, I am even bereft of anger. I feel sad. An endless sadness that grips my heart and squeezes hard, attempting to leech all the life from me.
'You are released,' she says to Daniel. 'I am glad for it.'
'Glad?' I say. 'How can you claim to be glad when it was your accusation that put him in gaol? It was your accusation that humiliated him in front of everyone. It was your accusation that would have seem him sent to the gallows.'
Lizzie chews at her lip again, touching her tongue to the corner where the skin is split.
'And yet he is free, and I am here.' She nods to the restraints where her wrists are strapped to the arms of the chair.
'For good reason, Lizzie. For good reason.'
'Yes. Yes,' she murmurs. 'For good reason.' She smiles up at Daniel. A smile that once had the power to bewitch the most chaste of men. 'You look well, Mr. Carver. It appears the town gaol treated you far better than Shelton treats me.'
