Ten years ago, Michaelmas. Summer hours fading into dusk, day dying slow. I had fallen out of the straight path into a place of harsh rocks and broken brambles, like the legend tells Satan fell from heaven on St. Michael’s Day. But I had fallen from no heaven, and those who pursued me were no angels.
A fog of pain overwhelms me, the world is turned all wrong. I will discover who did this, I will find the truth.
Yet as I struggle to catch up with the cart, I know that I am going only because my son is going away. My whole life is contained in that tortured, blackened husk. My child.
Where else would I go, but with him?
Any man among us has seen so many die over the years, the wave after wave of death sweeping in like a tide that strikes all, haphazard. The good, the bad, the virgin and the harlot: no one is spared, all go rose-spattered with plague lesions, and there is no sense, no judgment before doom strikes.
Death takes us all with the black malady or the sweating sickness or the white blindness or the winter croup, crops failing or bitter water in our mouths.
There is no justice to such deaths, and there is no sense.
But this fire – the flames that burned our boys – these few deaths were an act of malevolence. Someone intended this, there was a judgment made, an evil act. And in this, it is for sure and certain that there is a soul at fault. Someone can be blamed, if not for all the deaths that have been visited upon us, then for these deaths as a synecdoche for all that came before.
I will move heaven and earth to hold onto one thing that makes sense now, the few victims who can be atoned, the one tragedy that can be redeemed.
In the end, I listen to the fear that keeps me awake, that resounds through the frantic beating in my breast, the dry terror in my throat, the dread that comes with the pricking of the rat’s nervous feet in the darkness.
In the early hours of the night, I tell myself that the sound I hear is frost cracking, river ice breaking. I lie to my own heart, as one lies to a frightened child, one who cannot be saved from the conflagration.
All the while, I know it is a fire. And I know how near it is.
The novel Sinful Folk is the story of a mother who carries a hidden secret and a terrible grief. In December of the year 1377, the village of Duns in northeast England suffered a great tragedy. Children died in a house fire. The villagers undertook a desperate journey to demand justice for their children's deaths.
