17. Then Night
THEN: NIGHT
Iwas the first child in many winters to be put in the box.
The box was the length and width of a fully grown man. It sat on a plinth at the front of the stone church. Tibolt had covered it with burlap cloth and an oversized, illuminated copy of The Book of Rodwin, a piece of Sheridan family property donated to the church.
That tenth day, the day of the week sacred to Rodwin, the town of Sheridan filled the church and a flutter of perplexed curiosity spread amongst them at the sight of the uncovered plinth and box.
Our family sat in our regular pew, just behind the Sheridans and the lord’s men, the magistrate, the steward, the captain of the guard, and the like.
The illegitimate of the lord’s two sons turned from his seat in his pew and looked at me. He was my age and a beautiful boy.
“They say you are the girl they are going to box,” he whispered. “I do not think it is fair. It is winter and you will grow cold.”
Next to me Rowena gripped my hand, her eyes already wet.
I held my chin up and stared back at the boy. “I am not afraid of the cold.”
“Thane,” snapped the older of the sons, the one the lord had gotten on his lady wife and not another woman.
He was bigger but less beautiful, his features matching his younger brother’s but crueler in their arrangement.
“Turn around. Can you not see why she will be boxed? She is proud. Women are not allowed pride. They are to be ashamed and thankful. She is neither.”
The younger boy looked at me, and I could not stand the pity in his eyes. Then he said, “I am sorry, Bertram,” and turned around.
“Roberta,” Rowena whimpered next to me.
“I am not afraid,” I repeated and swallowed the lump in my throat. I looked at my father sitting three down from me, my mother and sister between us. He did not return my look.
My mother leaned across Rowena and said, “It is because we love you, Roberta. We do not want your soul to be forever damned.” Her eyes were wet too. “Do you understand?”
I could tell she needed me to say I did. So I said, “Yes.”
Brother Tibolt preached a tremulous sermon on forgiveness that day. He read from the essays of his namesake saint about how all mortals needed the grace of one another. He kept glancing towards our family, sadness in his eyes. Then he stepped to the side of his podium and nodded to the lord.
Torm Sheridan stood up and took the priest’s place. “Roberta Miller, please step forward.”
The silence in the church was a loud one, ringing in my ears.
“Get up,” my father said under his breath.
I stood, my body trembling. I was staring at my feet but when I raised my eyes, I found the boy called Thane had turned in his seat and was looking up at me. He held his chin up at me, the way I had at him. It was as if he was saying, “I know you are not afraid. You have just said so.”
Behind me Rowena had begun to cry.
“Now, girl,” boomed the lord’s voice.
I stepped into the aisle that cut down the center of the building. It was a few short paces and up two steps to reach the lord. I stood in front of the podium and nodded at him. “My lord,” I mumbled.
Standing next to Torm, Tibolt looked wilted.
“You have been accused and found guilty of the sin of rebellion,” Torm Sheridan went on.
“This is a foul thing to be found in the heart of a child, more so in a daughter. You will be boxed for a full day.” He opened the old box, and the iron hinges screeched from a lack of use.
He nodded to somewhere behind me, and there was the sound of bodies moving and then footsteps.
A set of hands came up under my armpits to lift me, and a second set of hands took hold of my legs just below my knees. As they lowered me into the box, I realized they were two of his keep guards.
The lid was lowered, and I was plunged into darkness. Above my face, two holes smaller than what I could fit my finger through let in some light and even less air.
Though it was muffled, I heard my mother begin to cry.
“Let this be a lesson, friends,” the lord went on.
“Girl children are not to be coddled. They are to have the sin punished out of them if necessary. They cannot become decent wives and mothers without guidance. If you love your daughters and wives, do you not want to save them from condemnation? The priest and I have discussed this. We are to return to a more faithful adherence to our saint’s message.
The days of grace and the writings of the Lesser Saint Tibolt are over. ”
The lord referenced the priest’s namesake of old—a bygone scholar of Rodwin—and not the man himself, but I could hear the scorn Torm had for the priest.
I listened to the sounds of several hundred people leaving the building, their voices rising and rising in discussion of this.
I heard my mother fall silent, likely hushed by my father.
I heard Brother Tibolt’s sorrowful voice through the air holes, telling me he was so sorry he had to allow for this.
And then I heard nothing, all of the stone echoes in that building receded and gone.
Though I was cold and afraid, I reasoned that it was not so bad, that I could withstand a day of this.
Telling myself this, I lay there for what seemed like a quarter hour before I heard anything else.
This time it was a hissing, like a snake’s breath.
At first I did not understand what it was.
Then my legs were wet, and I knew I had pissed myself.