“I subscribe to the teachings of my namesake,” he would preach. “The Lesser Saint Tibolt believed the best way to follow Rodwin and avoid our eternal souls being cast into the demon realm was through doing good and being good to others.”
Sheridan folk did not know what to think of this, most of them having been raised in the light of Kenneth’s hellfire. But how could one complain about a priest who smiled at everyone and admonished parents not to beat or publicly condemn their children too much?How could they find fault with a man who said that though women were born evil, the eradication of that evil was best done gently?
For twelve winters, the faith of Rodwin was preached in a more livable, inclusive way. This did not sit well with my father, a devotee of the stringent saint.
“That fat man is too soft,” he would gripe.
My father and a few other men did not allow Tibolt’s watered-down sermons to influence them and only held stronger to their belief in what Kenneth had told them as boys, that they were the divine gender, the heads of their households, and that women were corrupt.
My mother was a foundling child, dropped off at the lord’s keep as a babe with no known parentage. Our father had married her, rescuing her from a life of scullery and keep servitude; he expected her to be grateful for it. And she was.
His rages were mostly kept at bay by her. Everyone loved my mother. She was gregarious and could preempt a foul mood in both her husband and her superiors. She knew when to soothe and when to retreat, and she tried to teach us the same.
“You girls have to go along with him when he is mad,” she would whisper. “Agree with his anger. Even if you are the cause of it. Repent and repent immediately.”
Rowena would bob her head, eyes wide. I would nod too, my own rage a knot in my stomach. But around our seventh winter, I began to open my mouth. “But why are women evil?” I would ask.
He did not like this. He would shout at me, quoting scriptures that said a woman was not permitted questions. I would again ask why. I was not being tiresome. I truly wanted to know. By my tenth winter, I was boxed.
My father went to the priest and demanded the old practice be put in place. Brother Tibolt tried his best to dissuade my father from this, claiming it was a punishment for adulterers, thieves, and the like.
“She is beset by demons of hell,” claimed my father. “They havevisited us in this land, in this life, taking up home in her mind. She is sick with it.”
Tibolt would suggest my being made to recite scripture. The man was desperate, unaccustomed to anything but sermons about being kind to one’s neighbor. He had never been a priest. He had never had to exact or condone punishment.
Lord Sheridan, who was my father’s age and who had also grown up under the instruction of Father Kenneth, was called upon. He agreed with my father and with other men who found Tibolt too lenient. He told the priest he would write to King Pollux himself if the scriptures were not upheld in Sheridan.
17
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 ofThe 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.”
