Chapter Three
Theodore
Forgive me, father, for I have sinned.
It has been seven days since my last confession.
the Devil guides my thoughts to wickedness, and I fear I am too weak to fight him.
I have lustful thoughts for those I should not.
I crave violence, though I wish to serve in peace.
I have questioned the Lord, my Savior, and have feared that He has abandoned me.
I have questioned His love. I have harmed the temple in which He has gifted me, have looked upon it in disgust and hatred.
I know the scripture says that I am made in His image, yet I cannot help but deny it.
My body feels like the cage which holds the Accuser.
My mind is weak as he whispers in my ear unrighteous thoughts.
I pray the Lord’s forgiveness. I pray for His mercy when I depart from this mortal realm.
I fear my soul is a rotted thing.
There is only one butcher in the small village of Sainte-Falaise, and I wonder sometimes if it is God’s punishment that I can see him from the front window of my family’s shop.
In the mornings, when the sun has only just begun to rise and the day is stretched out long before him, he stalks into the front room, sleeves rolled up to his elbows, leather apron tied around his front, and begins his work.
He wields his butcher’s knife with a frightening sort of grace, an extension of his arm just as a swordsman wields his blade.
Each arching swing is precise and exact, decades of practice put on display, hidden by nothing but a sheet of glass and the old “Blackstone’s Butcher” painted across it in fading letters.
He slaps a chunk of meat on the countertop and blood splatters across the surface like paint.
I imagine I can hear the loud thunk of his blade meeting wood, the schwik of wet meat yielding to cool metal, the quiet grunt from his throat when he hits bone.
I imagine the musk of his sweat as it carves a river down the crooked slope of his nose and gets stuck in the thick of his beard.
Imagine the metallic aroma of the blood that stains his calloused hands.
I wonder what it might taste like if I sunk my teeth into the rippling muscle of his arm.
If his blood would spill from him in a slow stream or a great gushing mouthful.
Would he fight me? Would I feel the shifting of muscle and sinew beneath my tongue as he tried to shake me off?
Feel the flesh tear between my teeth as he tried to push me away?
Would he taste better than the beast he mutilates for anothers consumption?
The front window slowly fills as he works. My mouth waters as I watch.
Forgive me father, for I am a gluttonous thing, and I hunger, I hunger, I hunger.
“Theo, m’boy,” my father calls from behind me, drawing my attention away from the butcher’s window. I struggle to cage the Devil within me once more, to hide my panting breaths and my heaving chest. “I’d have thought you left already! The suns already up, and you’ve a long trek up the mountain.”
I turn to him, blinking away the lingering fuzz that threatens my vision when I am hungry. It takes me longer than I’d like to focus on him, to register his words and jolt with realization at the time. “Merde, I lost track of the time—”
“I suspected so.” My father ambles towards me, a slight limp to his step from when he fell from a ladder a few years back.
He holds out my satchel, heavy with my many books and journals, and when I glance inside, I find a wrapped lunch parcel with a note tucked beneath the twine.
“Make sure to eat, you hear? I know you get lost when you work, and I won’t have news coming down that you collapsed on the first day.
It's not much, just the porridge left over from supper, but it’ll keep until you get home.
I made sure to include some of the sausages too. ”
My stomach curdles at the idea of my father’s porridge, the bland taste and odd texture that I choked down the night before threatening to come back up by mere mention.
I am tempted to let it, if only so the stomach acid that would join it might burn the taste away, but I don't wish to see the worry on my father’s wrinkled face.
And he is right, besides. It wouldn’t do me well to faint from hunger on my first full day of work.
Especially after I'd assured Lady Alilovi? that I wouldn't disappoint her.
I swallow the bile that threatens to rise, and I think of the butcher.
“You still know the way, yes?”
“Everyone knows the way, papa. Just follow the trail, and if I get lost, listen for the sound of the widow’s lullaby.”
He scoffs and shakes his head as I shoulder my bag. “You jest, boy, but you were just a child when the missus of the house went o’er the cliffside. Terrible thing to joke about. Terrible, terrible.”
Perhaps the other villagers thought it a joke—a ghost story to tell to children who wander too close to the violent ocean waters—but I know better.
I have heard her song carried along the wind, fluttering through my open window like a robin in the early morning.
Familiar and aching. It whispers to the deep loneliness in my soul, cradling it like a mother would her babe.
No one knows what happened up there exactly, but we all know the story.
How Lady de Klein fell ill with hysteria and started wandering through the woods and streets at night.
How her husband began locking the doors to keep her safe inside.
How one night, beneath the watchful eye of the full moon, the Lady de Klein pitched herself off the cliff of Echo's Peak, remembered only by a grieving husband and the wind that still sings her song.
I wonder why she did it, sometimes. Why she stood at the edge of the cliff and thought the ocean floor a more comfortable bed to lay in than her own.
Was it truly the madness that drove her towards death, or did she crave an escape from a life she did not love? Did she yearn to feel for the first time in her too-short life? Did she run from a secret she dare not speak of in front of others?
My gaze finds the butcher again, and I watch as he tosses a new slab of meat down. Watch as the blood drips off the edge of the counter and pools on the floor at his feet.
“Theodore?”
There is a look my father gives me sometimes when he catches me fading.
One mixed with worry and pity, perhaps a little bit of fear.
If there is one thing I have never questioned in my life, it is my father’s love.
He has never stated so directly, but I think he knows of the Devil beneath my skin.
Has known, perhaps, since the moment I was placed in his arms as a babe, wretched and screaming and covered in blood.
My mother used to say I was born with a mouth full of teeth. She said I came into this world with a hunger that could never be sated and a belly that would never be full.
“The Mouth of the Devil,” Father Thompson calls me. “You crave the sins of man to feed the Devil’s army, my child. You must fight him, or I fear you will only succumb to the gluttonous cravings of the vile Serpent.”
Yet no matter how much I pray, the hunger does not fade. I can feel it still, that yearning, growling thing inside me that tears at my stomach and claws at my throat. Never happy. Never satisfied.
My teeth ache. My tongue is dry.
I am starving. I have always been starving.
Once, when I had just turned six and ten, my father took me with him to the city to pick up shipments of fabric for the shop. I had never been to a city so large, with so many people that pushed and pulled and bumped and tripped. It was loud and ugly. It stunk of rotten eggs and piss.
It was there that I saw my hunger in person for the very first time. It huddled on a street corner outside a dark alley, draped in rags the colour of dirt and stained in droplets of blood, petals of purple and yellow blossoming over knife-sharp cheekbones and beneath vein-painted eyes.
My hunger could not stand on its own two feet, its legs rail-thin and ankles too fragile. My hunger’s hands shook as it clutched a metal tin between its stick fingers and croaked for spare coin from the passersby.
I stared at that stranger on the corner, and I saw the starving beast within my own gut growing thinner and thinner by the day, shaking and begging from the confines of the ribbed cage I kept it in.
Just a bite, it says when a man bumps into us on the road.
Just a taste, it cries when I smile at the woman behind a counter.
Please. It rattles its tin can with bone-thin fingers. Please, I am so hungry.
No, I tell it. Over and over and over. No.
But there are times when my father looks at me and I fear he sees too much.
On the days when my waist grows too thin and my hands fumble too often with coin or needle, my father takes to the shop across the street and purchases us something gamey and thick.
We spread it out as much as we can, icing and salting what we do not use immediately, but my father always sneaks extra servings of meat into my bowl that he does not cook as long as his own.
I pray extra long those nights.
“Take Chrissy,” my father says when he has my attention once more. “We won’t be needing her today, and it’ll get you up and back quicker’n your feet will.”
I press a kiss to his cheek in thanks and let him muss my curls like he always does when he worries about me. “Lady Alilovi? doesn’t want me to stay later than sundown, so I should be home by supper. I’ll stick to the trail and follow the music if I get lost.”
He laughs quietly, like he doesn’t want anyone else to hear, and waves me off without another word.
I do not look at the butcher again.
“Your father says you are educated, yes?" Lady Azizi's steward asks shortly after I arrive at the chateau. "This includes reading and writing?”